Mountain View, CA-based Egnyte is combining its Protect and Connect platforms into a single Content Services platform. As data has expanded, business has become more geographically dispersed, and data protection regulations have increased around the world, so it has become more important for companies to have a combined solution for connecting data to staff while obeying all local governance requirements in any region.
“Digital content represents the lion share of data for most companies. In only the past few years we’ve seen its volume and value grow exponentially — and with that, its business risk,” said Egnyte CEO, Vineet Jain. He believes the only solution is to have a unified approach to security (the protect side of the platform) and productivity (the connect side of the platform) in order to ensure customer profitability.
“The only way you can scale that is with cloud-based machine learning and automation,” he suggests. He describes the new combined platform as democratizing content intelligence in “the content critical age where security and productivity must be thoroughly intertwined at every level.”
The ‘connect’ side of the platform ensures productivity by enabling collaboration throughout an organization, regardless of location. Relevant staff can access the latest version of any document — regardless of size — from anywhere in the world.
The ‘protect’ side of the platform uses AI and machine learning to provide deep visibility and control over the customers’ data assets, allowing them to enforce policies across all existing file systems. Users can detect unusual file behavior and control file access in real-time.
Support for local compliance requirements has also been expanded, from the obvious regulations such as GDPR, FINRA, HIPAA and CCPA to include the newer regulations such as the laws in India and Brazil expected to come into effect during 2020. The platform can also help users to respond to data subject access requests, such as GDPR’s ‘right to be forgotten’.
Ric Chura, CIO at Uniti Group, comments, “Uniti Group has acquired a number of companies over the past couple of years, so leveraging a single file sharing platform like Egnyte – with a high-security standard and governance over access to sensitive information – is a key component of our continued business success.“
Egnyte was founded in 2007 by Kris Lahiri (VP operations and CSO), Rajesh Ram (chief customer officer), and Vineet Jain (CEO), initially just offering cloud storage in a business context. Over the years, security and governance components have been added, and these have now been combined into a single platform.
The company has raised a total of $137.5 million in a series of funding rounds — the most recent being a $75 million Series E round entirely funded by Goldman Sachs in October 2018. The firm had grown six-fold since the previous investment in 2013, and the E round is likely to be the last investment before the firm eventually goes public. Other investors include Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Caufield & Byers.
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