In the financial holdings world, Wintrust Financial Corp is a model of diversification. With $64 billion in assets, the company has 16 chartered community banks as well as non-bank businesses offering an array of services including lending, wealth management, insurance finance, and beyond.

Successful content management across this vast landscape required a technology partner that could help the company build a well-rounded data governance strategy. With Egnyte as that partner, that’s exactly what Wintrust did.

Challenge: Build a Culture and Strategy Around Data Governance

The first sign that Wintrust’s technology was in need of change came from its file sharing practices. The solution the company was using for secure sharing, ShareFile, was clunky and riddled with issues.

As Michael Lambert, Chief Innovation Officer at Wintrust, puts it: “ShareFile just wasn’t intuitive. Users had trouble logging in, and there was no single sign-on. There was long downtime with every software update. We had limited visibility into what was being shared, when, and by whom. There were missing links and files, and the support services weren’t great.” These issues depressed user adoption of the solution and led to users sharing files without security protections, creating untenable risk for the company.
 

But addressing this issue was just one aspect of Wintrust’s larger mandate: to create a well-rounded and well-planned data governance strategy that would ensure true data ownership and responsible content management practices. This was critical given the volume of the company’s data, as well as the wide variety of stakeholders who would be sharing and managing it across Wintrust’s offices and business segments. “If we only focused on secure file sharing, we would ultimately have to replace whatever solution we went with as other needs arose,” says Lambert.

Solution: An Egnyte-Powered, User-Friendly Governance Strategy

Lambert’s team got to work on a plan to set policies across every key aspect of data governance – all in a way that would be accessible and understandable enough to ensure company-wide buy-in. Implementing the plan required thorough internal communication as well as replacing both ShareFile and Wintrust’s on-premises file server with Egnyte, which offered the intuitiveness, functionality, and partnership required to facilitate good governance and user adoption.

• Communication
  The success of Wintrust’s data governance strategy depended on employees having a clear understanding of why governance actually matters. Lambert understood that this should not be taken for granted. “Users don’t typically put much conscious thought into what data exists, where it exists, and who has access to it. They were shocked to see how broad Wintrust’s permissions landscape was,” Lambert says. “There’s also a pervasive assumption that all files need to be stored forever, which isn’t true. So we did a lot of work educating them about retention and the importance of drawing lines between what we need to keep and what we don’t. When we switched to Egnyte, it was a chance to show examples of files that don’t need to come with us in the migration.”
  Communicating major company-wide policy and technology changes requires trust and sensitivity, which is why Lambert’s team took care to work with trusted leaders, tailoring communication to each department. As he explains: “Different departments handle things like file sharing in different ways, so we made sure to find champions within each department, understand their needs, and channel our communication through them, instead of having IT dictate to the whole company.” 
   
• Egnyte’s role
  The functionality of Egnyte’s cloud-hosted file management system – particularly its Secure and Govern tool – facilitated every aspect of Wintrust’s data governance ambitions. “We organized data between personal and shared directories, and separated collaboration into its own space. Egnyte makes it easy to establish access permissions and data retention periods across these different environments and departments, execute on them, and make exceptions when necessary,” Lambert explains. “Its search functionality makes data discovery a breeze, so we don’t have to guess where something is stored. Its sensitive content detection and ransomware functionality help us stay on top of anything unusual. And it provides constant visibility into who has access to what data, where it’s stored, and who put it there.”

Benefits: Good Data Governance with Buy-In Across the Company

With a smart strategy, robust communication, and Egnyte in their corner, Lambert’s team has added structure to Wintrust’s unstructured data. The company has established a culture of true data ownership, exercised through Egnyte, across each department.

Critically, thanks to the policy-driven lifecycle management Egnyte has facilitated, the company’s storage requirements have hardly increased, even while its assets over the past five years have grown by $20 billion and its workforce by 2,000 employees. “We’re much better positioned to control the movement of files throughout our organization, as well as how much data we’re storing,” Lambert says. “And we’re able to do all of this with more confidence than we’ve ever had.”

One major factor enabling this level of control is Egnyte’s unusual activity monitoring and alerts. “Egnyte’s monitoring system quickly uncovers things like large file movements or deletions,” explains Lambert. “That information allows us to talk to the user, determine if the activity was unintentional or malicious, and act quickly to mitigate any impacts. This process used to take months – now it’s immediate. Egnyte’s integration with Splunk has added further efficiency, centralizing alerts from all our systems in one place. And the users are grateful to be aware and able to help in recovery, which speaks to the strong culture of data governance and ownership that we’ve created.”

The company is now finalizing cleanup of its historical and technical debt. Lambert’s team is further maturing their processes with department champions to review data over time and increase automation of data loss prevention. None of this would be possible without the ease of use and broad functionality that Egnyte provides. “Systems with issues don’t get adopted,” Lambert says. “Users avoid them. That’s the problem we faced before. We don’t face it with Egnyte.”

MOMA Therapeutics is a clinical-stage, next-generation biotech doing big things in precision medicine. But while its R&D, which focuses on utilizing its proprietary KNOMATIC™ platform to discover small-molecule medicines that target highly dynamic proteins is innovative, it’s also extremely data-intensive. That makes the firm’s IT posture paramount, especially as it relates to CRO collaboration and the management of lab data.
 

When the IT services provider Pliancy connected MOMA with Egnyte, the company maximized efficiency, efficacy, and control in these critical areas.

Challenge: Make External Collaboration More Efficient and Secure

MOMA started its first Phase I clinical trial in 2024, a milestone that is both exciting and a signifier of the four-year-old company’s relative youth. At this early stage, conducting an in-house trial can be costly–a consideration that has made MOMA inclined to partner with CROs for many clinical development activities.
 

“Clinical is an extremely expensive function for a company of our size,” explains Kate Hardy, Senior Director of Informatics and Technology at MOMA. “We can’t justify the cost of hiring a ton of full-time employees to build out a full clinical organization yet.”
 

While outsourcing has helped MOMA be more intentional with their budget, it has also complicated the company’s information environment. “We now have this mixed environment of both internal and external people, so for security purposes, we need to have really good control and visibility into who has access to what information,” Hardy says. “The goal was to strike a balance between making content easily accessible to those who need to see it, while also ensuring external collaborators didn’t get access to something only MOMA employees should see.”
 

Access controls weren't the only issue: Partners could resort to suboptimal file sharing practices without a structured and well-governed content environment. “In my previous experience working with CROs, I've seen data frequently shared through email due to lack of access to a centralized repository,” explains Hardy.

Then there was the issue of lab data. As Hardy explains: “Scientists collect valuable data on lab instruments, but it gets siloed on computers in the lab. To get it into the database, they might email it to themselves or use thumb drives. This is just a nightmare from a security perspective, and an efficiency perspective.”

Solution: A Unified and Secure Content Environment in the Cloud

Pliancy is a key partner in MOMA’s technology strategy. The IT services provider allows MOMA to outsource much of its technology workload, from business tools to security licenses and beyond. As Hardy puts it: “Pliancy is effectively my IT team.”
 

It was through Pliancy that MOMA connected with Egnyte to address the issues MOMA was facing with collaboration and lab data management. Hardy was able to create a folder structure in Egnyte with a designated area for external collaborators, giving CRO partners an easy way to share data without resorting to email and thumb drives. She offers an example: “If there’s a CRO doing assay screening for us and we want to get their raw data files, they just drop them into the proper folder. Their scientists can log into Egnyte and upload the content, and we can immediately see it.”
 

Egnyte’s access permissions functionality allowed MOMA to group users by role and provision access to different folders accordingly. This ensured CROs only had access to the proper folders for external collaborators and were blocked from viewing data intended for MOMA employees.
 

Robust permissioning on its own may not always be sufficient as human error is a possibility. But Egnyte provided holistic visibility and timely alerts that keeps MOMA on top of any irregularities. “Egnyte makes it so easy to audit the entire content lifecycle,” Hardy says. “We can see exactly who has access to what, who is downloading and deleting content, and whether they’re doing so appropriately. We once had a situation where information had been unintentionally added to a folder for the wrong collaborator, and using the Egnyte audit reporting features, we were able to confirm nothing had been viewed or accessed by the incorrect people. This is especially important now that we are working in a much more regulated space and need to be compliant with our handling of PHI and PII. I appreciate that we can set alerts for sensitive content access and sharing.”
 

Critically, Egnyte’s lab-to-cloud functionality freed MOMA and its scientists from the poor lab data management practices that had previously dogged them. As Hardy explains: “We can map the drive of our lab computers to a specific location within Egnyte. That means any data generated on lab instruments is automatically fed into Egnyte, which is more secure and convenient for our scientists.”

Benefits: More Efficiency and Less Risk in CRO Outsourcing

MOMA is currently using Egnyte to collect data from 16 lab instruments. Collaborating with CROs has never been easier or more secure. And all of these benefits have come through a platform perfectly suited to Hardy’s, and MOMA’s, needs. “As someone who needs to run IT efficiently, I think Egnyte is just fantastic,” Hardy says. “We don’t need to hire administrators–it just works. It has so many great tools for keeping things secure and compliant, it keeps our lab data safe and organized, it’s flexible in terms of content access, and it’s so easy to use that onboarding is a breeze.”

Sean Akers, IT Consultant at Pliancy, echoes that last point: “Egnyte is probably the easiest file sharing tool I’ve used. Organizing everything and setting up permissions is very smooth, and on the rare occasions when we do get support tickets, it’s always something we can handle quickly.”
 

Now that MOMA has established a stronger security posture and built a thorough permissions structure, the next step is to expand on policies to address questions such as what kinds of files are tagged as sensitive and where they’re stored. With that in mind, Hardy expects her future use of Egnyte to include Egnyte’s Secure & Govern tool.

MOMA has used other file sharing and collaboration platforms, namely Microsoft SharePoint and Teams. They have now standardized on Egnyte. “We prefer to limit our external use of technology platforms, and if we have to choose one to use both internally and externally, it’s definitely Egnyte,” Hardy explains. “This isn’t just because of how easy it is to use or the features I’ve already described. It’s because Egnyte has extensive experience working with life sciences companies and because they’re so great to work with. Whatever the issue, I always know Egnyte will listen to it and solve it. I certainly can’t say that about all vendors.”