How Egnyte aims to protect company data, no matter where it is stored

Content risk management is like the open secret all of us are aware of, yet fail in tightening the grip. Owing to the new norms of hybrid and remote-first office environments, content is the most exposed data.

Egnyte, an all-in-one platform, makes it easier for IT to manage and control a full spectrum of content risks including preventing data loss, adhering to regulatory and privacy mandates, detecting and remediating ransomware attacks, and proper data lifecycle management, while ensuring businesses use the content they require to work faster and smarter, from any device, anywhere.

The beginning

When Egnyte initiated its journey back in 2007 out of Silicon Valley, the entire idea was to fundamentally shift a file server into a multi-tenant cloud architecture: “There was a need for proper software solutions where companies could store their data with the liberty of accessing it from anywhere, thereby reducing the cost of buying hardware,” says Vineet Jain, Chief Executive Officer, Egnyte.

The startup was initially dedicated towards shifting the entire content management infrastructure to the cloud. As their clientele base started to expand beyond the SMB/Midsize enterprises, they also felt the need to shift their focus to the growing concerns around privacy and security of data, and policies of governance and regulatory compliance. Egnyte could foresee the future being cloud, and thus made the strategic business decision of shifting engineering development to securely sharing sensitive data in multi-cloud environments. Specifically, in environments with a blend of on-premises and cloud repositories. Today Egnyte has evolved into a unified cloud content governance solution for collaboration, data security, compliance, and threat detection for multi-cloud businesses.

Responding to the reason behind naming the company ‘Egnyte’, Amrit Jassal, the Chief Technology Officer, explains, “It was a way of revolutionising the ways and structures that people have known for so long. Egnyte is the change that needs to be brought in ideas.”

Business and growth

“Making sure that the product is relevant for the market and hiring the right people is critical while setting up a new venture,” states Vineet when asked about the roadblocks he had to go through. However, one particular challenge was that the cloud at that time was not a mainstream concept, and the trending thought was to opt for a ‘freemium’ approach, i.e., offering something for free, but charging more for “premium” features.

But Vineet believed in the prudence of cloud technology which was slowly coming into sync. Egnyte relied on the quality of the product and stuck to its ideology of never offering a perpetual free product. With technology moving at such a rapid rate, the Egnyte co-founders knew the cloud was the future, and they decided to advance their solution to align with the changing technology landscape.

Interestingly, with Egnyte's growth trajectory of its 16,000+ customers growing worldwide, the growth rate has accelerated to 40% in quarter over quarter terms. Being fiscally prudent is the motto that drives Egnyte. Despite creating a customer base with major names like BCG, RedBull, and IKEA, the core target groups for Egnyte are the mid-market companies, which generates almost 60 percent of the total revenue.

Why Egnyte?

Amrit clarified unstructured content as, “The files, emails, and the bulk of content which are not found in an enterprise’s database.” Egnyte ensures that enterprises manage their content in a secure way, both inside and outside the company. Also, delving deeper into the aspect of security, Egnyte applies the policies of governance and data compliance to the content placed in various file repositories, whether they are Egnyte’s own or third-party repositories.

COVID-19 has actively become a part of the growth story of Egnyte. It has accelerated the pace of remote working worldwide, thus increasing the chances of massive content vulnerability while creating a business need for secure file sharing outside corporations’ security perimeters. Securing remote work therefore becomes significant and starts with identifying valuable/sensitive content and then applying the policies that persistently secure the data, whether that data be in transit, in use, or at rest.

Egnyte doesn’t market or sell in India, but almost all its major clients have their operational bases here. So, Egnyte invariably ropes in Indian users, not directly but under the aegis of their clients across the globe. However, the problem of managing content remains the same irrespective of the country.

Why join Egnyte?

India is the hot bed of techie talents, and it’s always a great thing to work at the heart of change. Egnyte has already started paving the way for the new future of work in today’s hybrid model. Thus, it’s always enticing to join a workforce that opines new technologies while overcoming hurdles, and promising a revolutionizing future that fits in the landscape. Be with the best business, and grab your chance of career enhancement in a decentralized workforce.

Future plans

One of the biggest challenges while tracing the growth is scaling up, according to Vineet. Egnyte envisions scaling up their engineering operations, while building their core team in India, with 50-100 immensely talented engineers in the shortest timespan.

The plan is to provide growth opportunities for creating teams related to core infrastructure-related improvements, and a huge product expansion on the data security side. Besides, Egnyte has a list of interesting problems when operating on petabytes of data and processing billions of requests. Amrit feels that India, being the land of technical talents, would be interested in working on these unsolved problems, and enhance the path of understanding.

Looking at Egnyte’s future, there will be massive investments in the various tenets of the organisation, including talent expansion and growing the company’s global footprint. Lastly, as the convergence of governance and collaboration increases as a viable market opportunity, with the escalating concerns about data security, Vineet dreams of Egnyte potentially becoming “three times the size of what we are now.”