Partner Article

Businesses need ‘app-y’ new technology

Apps are now central to our professional lives, checking email and news as soon as we wake. We play games to cut boredom on our commute to work and use apps when we get there to help us work faster and smarter, writes Rajesh Ram, vice president of Products and Customer Advocacy at Egnyte.

The app market is serious business and is set to be over £100 billion in four years, but the question remains: how serious are most businesses about apps?

With the total data stored expected to reach 8 zettabytes by 2015, companies are becoming increasingly aware of the need to control their data. Many of today’s workers are more than happy to use the same unsecure consumer applications to share sensitive work documents. Most businesses do not even realise the extent to which employees use ‘consumer grade’ file sharing technology at work.

So what are the alternatives? The danger is employees will use unapproved apps to share and store files which contain sensitive information. This means businesses are losing control, opening them up to the risk of losing intellectual property (IP). ‘Home grade’ technology built for light usage, sharing videos and family albums, does not offer the security or stability required by business.

Numerous options have now become available in the market to address these concerns. They bring control to the chaos of ‘worst practice’ in file sharing in businesses, however take up by businesses has been more cautious. According to analysts, 61 per cent of businesses are still unwilling to store their files in the cloud, citing reasons such as the following:

• Speed – Worries over the time it takes to manage and work on large files such as drawings, videos etc.
• Network Issues – Whether current networks will be able to cope if all employees are syncing documents from between their devices.
• Security – How to know whether data is being as securely stored as it would be on-premise.

Egnyte provides businesses with the best of breed file sharing technology and focus on returning control back IT management as well as giving employees an easy to use app to work with. This company only caters for the needs of the enterprise, making file sharing industrial grade. Control returns to the management now have a single view of who has access to which file in real time. For employees, we’ve added functionality, such as ‘Drag and Drop’, making it easier for employees to store files in one movement.

Businesses need to have options on where they would like to keep their data. Referring to earlier statistics, the majority of businesses won’t be moving files into the cloud. Egnyte understands this so it offers a local storage solution, providing faster transfer speeds and giving businesses peace of mind in light of recent data privacy scandals.

Businesses do not have to carry on with the status quo; empowerment not restriction should be the tone coming from management about the use of new technology. By accepting that consumerisation of IT really is here to stay and finding secure alternatives to the consumer grade products which are (in some cases) risking businesses’ survival, businesses can be happy about the ‘appartunity’.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Egnyte .