3 Things to Consider When Looking for a Secure Content Platform

Business leaders who are responsible for providing users with access to their company’s intellectual property also realize the importance of keeping it secure.  They are also likely championing the advantages of digital transformation as a way to improve their own company’s operations while delivering a more secure environment for data, workloads, and users.A recent IDC report identified Egnyte as a leading vendor among cloud content solution providers and highlighted this leadership with three fundamental strengths. The report emphasizes the need for enterprises to be able to operate in a flexible, secure environment, and to be able to operationalize and uncover the value in their content. Let’s look at these strengths in more detail:

1. What is a Secure Content Platform?

It’s no secret that unstructured data growth - which includes, among other things, files like videos, pdfs, spreadsheets and presentations - is exploding. In fact, Gartner estimates that 80% of a company’s data is unstructured data!Anyone responsible for any aspect of their company’s unstructured data recognizes the need to secure it. But most are unable to distinguish between sensitive and non-sensitive content contained within their file servers and other repositories. This lack of context inhibits visibility. This, in turn, leads to situations where policy enforcement isn’t possible, which inevitably results in increased vulnerabilities.What’s required is a solution that provides insight and governance into company content - including the ability to find sensitive content, control who can access it, and detect unusual file access behavior. In addition to the content governance capabilities outlined above, Egnyte’s secure content platform offers reporting and auditing capabilities to help further reduce the risk of exposure.

2. What Should a Flexible Content Platform Offer?

Content management solutions developed only for the cloud lack the flexibility required of companies that operate in on-premises, multi-cloud, or hybrid environments. Agility and adaptability are especially important for companies with a geographically dispersed workforce. Construction firms, for example, require their contractors to access project files from jobsites and remote offices, which often have limited Internet connectivity.An Egnyte hybrid deployment can selectively cache those files to low-cost storage at the jobsite to provide fast, reliable access – even when connectivity is slow or unavailable.

3. What Are Some Ways to Operationalize Business Content?

The massive growth of content can create an inverse reaction in the understanding of what’s in that content and how it’s used. There’s also a recognition that without context, content is less searchable, and therefore, less usable. And without knowledge of how it’s being used, there is little that can be done to secure it.The IDC report states that 34% of their survey respondents expect to use AI to analyze data for insight into the use of content. To support awareness and understanding of enterprise content, the Egnyte platform offers intelligent metadata capabilities, and “a rich set of analytics for business content to understand user behavior, collaboration patterns (e.g., social graphs), and content protection.” – in IDC’s own words.In addition to leveraging machine learning to search, analyze and protect the content, a secure business content platform should also have the ability for fine-grained control of the business content in order to guard sensitive information and prevent data leakage through unusual downloads. This sort of fine-grained control is key for businesses such as Life Sciences organizations, where a single FDA filing may require hundreds of different reviews and approvals that involve a strict segregation of small subsets of data, each of which can only be shared with specific individuals. Egnyte’s Secure Content Platform uses a roles-based delegation and a fine-grained permissions model second to none in the industry.To read the IDC MarketScape report on SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Content Applications, download a copy of the report here.