Campbell University, a private institution serving approximately 5,000 students, faced significant challenges due to escalating electronic data, network complexity, and stricter security regulations. Its lean IT team struggled with fragmented on-premises file storage, burdensome permission management, and outdated data sharing methods that presented security vulnerabilities and compliance risk. Recognizing these pressures, Campbell initiated a strategic cloud migration to centralize content and enhance data protection.

Partnering with Egnyte, Campbell achieved digital transformation. The secure cloud platform streamlined IT operations, empowered departmental users with self-service file permissions, and fostered real-time collaboration. Crucially, Egnyte fortified the university’s data security posture with advanced features like ransomware detection and robust data governance, facilitating compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.

The Challenge: Overwhelmed IT, Fragmented Data, and Growing Compliance Pressures

Prior to its strategic cloud migration, Campbell University grappled with escalating IT and data management challenges. Assistant CIO John Skuce noted a dramatic increase in electronic data and network size in recent years, with thousands of devices requiring protection. Document and network security became paramount concerns, adding significant pressure to the IT department.

A primary hurdle for the university's already-busy IT staff was the administrative burden of local file storage. "We have a very small staff, and we spent so much time upgrading servers, and assigning permissions to various folders and files," Skuce explained. It was also difficult to maintain version control when files were shared as email attachments.

From a financial perspective, Deborah Gibbs, University Bursar, highlighted challenges in handling sensitive financial documents. “There was an attitude that data breaches happened to others but not here or in higher ed in general, and it was solely IT’s responsibility.” Sensitive information was often shared through physical storage devices or sent via campus mail, email attachments, and fax…methods that lacked the robust security and centralized control now deemed essential.

The evolving regulatory landscape, including HIPAA and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), led the university to confront the reality that data security was no longer optional. Gibbs underscored this, stating, "We understood that there are consequences, both financial and reputational, for non-compliance."

Solution: A Unified Platform for Campus Efficiency and Security

To address its data management and security challenges, Campbell University implemented Egnyte as its comprehensive content platform, enabling a new approach to file storage, collaboration, and data governance. The move addressed administrative burdens on its small IT department, particularly by empowering departmental users with permission management. Skuce stated, "Egnyte has enabled us to offload a lot of administrative tasks directly to our users, which has helped us tremendously. Now IT can focus on more strategic initiatives.” The platform’s ease of use led to rapid, widespread adoption, with approximately 850 users across administrative and academic departments. Gibbs expressed, "I was surprised how quickly Egnyte was embraced by the university community after its implementation. People were eager to learn it, and everyone is actually using it."

 

Empowering Collaboration and Ensuring Robust Security

Egnyte transformed campus-wide collaboration by replacing fragmented legacy methods with seamless Microsoft 365 integration. This allowed users to share secure links instead of email attachments, while enabling real-time co-editing of documents. Skuce affirmed, “Now, it's very easy to share links, and people can collaborate in real-time on a single document, which has been incredibly helpful.” Beyond collaboration, Egnyte’s Secure & Govern product provides crucial data protection capabilities. “My favorite aspect of Egnyte is ransomware protection, which helps me sleep better at night.” 

Driving Efficiency in Financial Settings

In the Bursar's office, Egnyte enhanced the management of sensitive financial data. Protected information can be securely emailed to parents and students via links. Internally, Egnyte facilitates secure file sharing with critical teams like bill clearance, general counsel, and finance, streamlining daily operations. Gibbs stated, “Egnyte has provided the Bursar's office a tool to be more confident in the way that we handle and protect sensitive information.” Audit processes are also streamlined. Campbell teams can set up secure folders for sharing sensitive student and financial data with external auditors, overcoming previous difficulties with cumbersome portals and access. Gibbs affirmed that "providing access to the audit team has been extremely easy" with Egnyte's simple permission features.

Results: Enhanced Efficiency, Strengthened Security, and Campus-Wide Empowerment

Egnyte’s implementation yielded significant results across Campbell University, fundamentally transforming its operational efficiency, security posture, and collaborative capabilities.

The IT department experienced a substantial reduction in its administrative burden. By enabling departments to manage their own file permissions, valuable IT resources are freed up for more strategic initiatives. The rapid and widespread user adoption was a key indicator of success.

Collaboration across campus has been dramatically improved. Cross-functional departments can now easily share secure links and co-edit documents in real-time. Skuce explained that this new collaborative environment has streamlined work processes throughout the university. The ability to collaborate seamlessly has also generated environmental benefits, by significantly reducing the amount of paper used at the university. This unified approach has created a centralized repository for all critical documents, including student, faculty, and payroll data, enhancing overall document security.

The Bursar's office has greater confidence and control over sensitive financial data. This newfound confidence stems from the ability to securely send protected information externally to parents, students and auditors, as well as internal teams.

Finally, Egnyte has significantly enhanced job satisfaction and operational flexibility across Campbell University. Team members can now access information securely from anywhere, at any time. Gibbs summarized the impact, stating, "Egnyte literally brings everyone together, which has improved the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall job satisfaction for our team members.”
 

As companies grow, their challenges often grow along with them. Clearstead Advisors, a Cleveland-based registered investment advisor with the SEC offering comprehensive financial services, has learned this firsthand. In the past five years, it has roughly doubled its staff, tripled its assets under management, and opened several new office locations. The only challenge? This growth led to data sprawl, inconsistent IT usage, and heightened challenges in navigating a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. 

Partnering with Egnyte has empowered the firm to gain control over these critical challenges without impeding its growth in the process.

Challenge: Inconsistent IT Threatens Compliance

The more staff and acquisitions Clearstead brought on, the more employees needed to access the company’s data from different locations. Steven Wolken, Chief Compliance Officer at Clearstead, knew this paradigm was only sustainable if there was uniformity in the systems people used to access the data – something Clearstead lacked. “Some offices were using SharePoint, some were using local servers, some were using cloud. Clearstead needed a system that could consolidate networks from its multiple locations,” Steve explains. “Clearstead needed to address how people saved data. Locations were saving data by client, some by year, and others by service. All of this created data sprawl, and the resulting lack of visibility into what content was stored where and how it was being shared created potential risks.”

The intensifying regulatory landscape governing the financial sector only ratcheted up the stakes of managing this sprawl. In recent years, financial service companies like Clearstead have faced a patchwork of federal and state privacy and compliance regulations requiring them to maintain full visibility into what client data they have in their systems and where it resides. As Steve explains: “At the federal level, you have the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which regulates how financial institutions handle client’s nonpublic personal information. Then you have a patchwork of state-level privacy laws, plus international regulations like EU GDPR. The growth we were experiencing made it hard to ensure all the data in our multi-system environment was monitored, and it only got more challenging as we grew and new regulations kept changing.”

The firm tried several approaches to unifying its disparate IT environment, including using VPNs to connect remotely to offices and attempting to implement SharePoint as a potential solution. But users complained about challenges in areas like file access and collaboration. “SharePoint, in particular, was not an adequate solution,” says Dennis Kasper, Senior Managing Director, Systems and Cybersecurity at Clearstead. “File changes took hours to sync, resulting in conflicting versions. Users hated it. It got so bad we ended up going back to on-premises file management.”

Solution: Leverage Egnyte to Unify Data Environment

Clearstead kicked off a search for a modern, cloud-based file management platform that would enable the company to scale a unified infrastructure to all its remote offices. The team began evaluating Egnyte on the recommendation of several partners and vendors who were using the platform. “Egnyte checked all the boxes,” says Edward Mielcarek, Managing Director, IT Operations at Clearstead. “It performed well, was extremely scalable, and had a great, feature-rich user interface.” Perhaps the most important aspect of that interface was the presentation of data through a mapped file drive, which was aligned with the way users had developed workflows with their previous systems and therefore allowed them to navigate their content in a way that worked for them.

Critically, Egnyte provided the speed and easy file access that was necessary to overcome the user resistance that made VPN reliance and SharePoint untenable. “Our users need to share data freely. They’re not willing to compromise on speed and access. Egnyte was a great solution for these folks,” Dennis says. With user resistance out of the way, Clearstead was able to consolidate its IT from its disparate systems into Egnyte – a massive step toward reducing the data sprawl that had previously caused so much trouble.

Through features such as Secure & Govern, Egnyte also provided essential support in meeting the intensifying regulatory demands facing the financial sector. As Steve puts it: “As we continue to grow and add more data, not only do we need to monitor and protect client data with strong security measures, we also need an easy way to catalogue it. That’s a huge part of regulatory compliance for financial service firms. And those governance capabilities are built right into the Egnyte system.”

Benefits: More Confidence in Compliance and Security

With Egnyte, Clearstead has been able to neutralize its data sprawl issues and position itself to meet compliance requirements in an evolving regulatory environment – all without creating userexperience challenges that could hinder its ability to get its work done efficiently. “The SEC has increased its focus on cybersecurity, which will only require more governance and monitoring capabilities from firms like ours,” Steve says. “Working with Egnyte allows us to address new regulations.”

On the user experience side, Dennis emphasized the importance of Egnyte’s file explorer interface, noting that "to me that is the anchor that allows us to do other things". He explained that while document management solutions can be a drastic change for users accustomed to Windows File Explorer, Egnyte provides a familiar foundation upon which a document management experience can be built. This foundation positions Clearstead to move forward with rolling out more advanced features, such as metadata tagging and automated workflows, available through Egnyte's web interface, and also to restructure their data for better accessibility and leverage.

Now that Clearstead’s data is migrated into Egnyte, the firm is looking to further improve its process with Egnyte features like metadata tagging and workflows. For other financial firms dealing with data sprawl and compliance demands, Edward has some advice: “Don’t wait to switch to Egnyte. We should have done this a long time ago. Now that we have, I’m really excited to keep learning more about how we can use the platform to further improve our security and governance posture and make our user experience the best it can be.”

Carson Group makes finding financial freedom simple for its clients. In an industry as sensitive as financial planning, security and speed are indispensable to any firm hoping to achieve this goal. But Carson constantly fought against inefficient systems that impeded communication, complicated internal and external file sharing, and hampered growth.
 

With the help of Egnyte, its native Salesforce integration, and open API, Carson Group confronted these challenges head-on, streamlining outdated processes and accelerating everything from internal collaboration to mergers and acquisitions, as well as client onboarding.

Challenge: Inconsistent Document Management Platforms and CRMs

To keep up with new client and partner onboarding, Carson Group needs to be able to share documents efficiently and control access consistently. But without one unified file management platform, collaboration was limited and inflexible. As Business Systems Manager Taylor Geist explains, more tools didn’t necessarily translate to better results: “For document storage, we used a couple of things, including DocuPace and Dropbox. They got the job done, but they weren’t user-friendly or appealing to use. You stored your stuff, and that was it.”
 

On top of that, Carson Group’s partner offices all used their own technology platforms, creating a slew of data governance issues and an added burden on IT administration. “The partners used one platform, we used another. This led to file duplication and complicated our processes,” Geist explains. "The inconsistencies among the various CRMs and content management platforms in play were creating real problems, and we knew we’d need to solve that lack of consistency as we grew.”
 

These time and resource constraints quickly added up, leading to slower, sometimes incomplete client onboarding processes. Transferring a client’s data from third-party companies and organizing it into something actionable could take up to a week, Geist says. "The process relied on manual work across a variety of different platforms, which made it error-prone – we would get to the end of an onboarding and find that some information was missing or had been entered incorrectly. What we needed was a holistic process bolstered by documentation and automation, so we wouldn’t have to keep going back and fixing these issues.”

Solution: One Source of Truth for Governance and Collaboration

After cycling through several platforms that didn’t hit the mark, Carson Group found Egnyte and, using the native integration and open API, connected it with the company’s CRM, Salesforce. “The Egnyte integration adds an Egnyte tab right on that household. Anyone with appropriate permissions has direct access to all the client documentation that’s stored in Egnyte, right from Salesforce,” explains Geist.
 

Seeing how well Egnyte worked here led the team to use Egnyte for secure file sharing between their clients, advisors, and prospective partners as well—no email attachments required. “We also use Egnyte with our M&A team specifically as a deal room of sorts. We can set up designated folders for the prospect to drop documentation, and Egnyte makes it very easy for us to share that with people not in our system,” says Geist. Egnyte’s flexible functionality makes governance easier too, he explains. “We can set time frames and security parameters for file or folder access, as well as allow people to upload content with alerts to our team when they do, which is a fantastic feature. It takes so much back and forth out of the conversation.”
 

Geist says Egnyte also makes it easier to set access permissions right from the start. Now, any documents added to folders are subject to that folder’s unique permissions. “Egnyte adds confidence to our process,” Geist explains. “It makes things much more efficient because you know you’ve got access set up the way you need to.” Egnyte’s flexible UX has also been a plus. For example, users can easily set their own preferences, like deciding whether they want notifications. “It works for every person in their own way,” says Geist.

Benefits: More Productivity, Less Risk and Data Sprawl

Since integrating Egnyte into their Salesforce ecosystem, Geist says Carson Group has been able to unlock new levels of efficiency and enable more connected client and partner experiences. He points to three specific benefits that have empowered this shift:

• More secure file sharing

  The files Carson Group works with often contain sensitive financial information sought after by cybercriminals. Geist says Egnyte’s Salesforce integration makes sharing these documents “as secure as it could be right from the contact record.” Now, clients can securely log into Salesforce and access Egnyte folders directly on the platform as needed. Or they can be sent a secure sharing link to a specific file or folder.

• Faster onboarding
  Migrating files from new partners has become much faster as well. “It's been very easy to say to prospects, ‘We’ve created a centralized environment for you to upload and organize all your documents,’” Geist explains. “One of the most challenging aspects of the onboarding and M&A processes is getting the right information as the deal progresses, so this has made things much easier and more efficient.” 

  Egnyte offers flexibility of migration as well. “Egnyte has significantly accelerated the process for onboarding new partners,” Geist explains. Rather than organizing their content after it has been uploaded, partners have the option to map all their folders and files before migration, limiting post-migration work. Geist recalls one partner who created mappings for their Dropbox folders: “It was shockingly easy. The partner created their mappings, and once the content was in Egnyte, they didn’t have to make any changes.”

• Less busy work

  Geist says teams have found multiple use cases for Egnyte’s automated workflows, like generating client review decks. “It’s a very simple process for advisors to generate a client review presentation, and drop that right back into Egnyte,” Geist explains. Small process improvements like these have quickly added up, giving employees more time to focus on high-value work. “It takes some of the tedious work away from our advisors and our operation staff,” says Geist.

By transitioning internally from disparate file management systems to Egnyte, enabling partners and clients to upload any necessary documents into Egnyte with ease, and integrating Egnyte with Salesforce so that it all appears in one place, Carson has created a single source of truth for all the data that drives its business forward. From client onboarding to M&A, all stakeholders have an easier, more efficient, and secure system for sharing and processing critical content. Looking ahead, Carson knows that, as they continue to expand, they’ve found a technology partner that can grow alongside them.

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.”

Tilt, a studio producing broadcast and digital content for marketing and advertising campaigns, had firmly embedded another provider as its file management solution. But the firm’s numerous high-profile clients demand strict data security compliance, and Tilt eventually found that provider wasn’t the best fit to meet those demands.

This realization sparked a switch to Egnyte, empowering Tilt to more effectively govern content and confidential data access. Its clients couldn’t be happier

Challenge: Inflexible Permissions Cause Compliance Headaches

As part of a merger with another creative firm in 2018, a wide array of clients were introduced to Tilt’s portfolio, including high-profile companies like Audi and Walmart. At that time, Tilt was using a different provider to manage enormous amounts of data.

“That’s when the confidential nature and size of the data became a challenge,” says Dave Trownsell, Founder and President of Tilt. “Our prior solution had a waterfall permissions structure, where the access permissions settings of one folder cascade down to all its subfolders without any way to adjust them for particular users or subfolders. When analyzing our folder structures, we realized that the organization's security posture for eliminating high-impact vulnerabilities could be improved upon.”

This was not only an internal issue; Tilt’s clients needed to see if they were meeting data protection needs specific to their organization. “Some of our major clients required us to be certified in ISO-27001 and TISAX (a global standard for information security in the automotive industry). The provider at the time was not a conducive platform for this type of need,” Trownsell explains. “Security auditors would find the waterfall structure to be a point of failure for our clients.”

Trownsell was interested in switching to Egnyte. But migrating such a massive amount of data felt daunting. As Trownsell explains: “I was running reports to try to find out where files were stored and asking users to clean up their folders. From a technical standpoint, moving to a new system in such conditions was a big task.”

Fortunately, Egnyte made things much easier than he expected. Plus, he had a secret weapon on his own team.

Solution: Migrate to Egnyte and Take Control of Permissions

Nikita Moyer, Senior Project Manager at Tilt, began planning for a migration to Egnyte alongside the Tilt project management team. The plan included target dates for key milestones and communications to staff. Trownsell describes the team’s work as “remarkable,” adding that “they’re excellent employees who handled the migration masterfully.”

“Like Dave, I was concerned at first. But Egnyte is really simple and intuitive, and that made the migration smooth,” Moyer says. “With Egnyte, we get really good version control and alerts, which has made it easy to take our organizational framework even further to ensure everything is as streamlined and efficient as possible."

Once the migration was complete, Egnyte became Tilt’s primary repository for business operations information, project master files, content related to budgeting and scheduling, and creative assets. The team was able to govern access to this content at a much more granular level than the previous provider allowed.

“Previously, if a folder had a subfolder with content that we only wanted certain people to access, we had to break the folder structure and create an amended one” Moyer says. “But Egnyte allows for different layers of access for different folders and subfolders. It’s much more customizable at the per-person, per-team, and per-folder level than other cloud-based file storage systems we've encountered. That also made it more secure to share content with outside freelancers, whom we work with a lot.”

Egnyte didn’t just offer granular permissions functionality but also made it easy for Tilt to run reports on its permissions landscape. This was critical for satisfying its clients’ compliance demands. As Trownsell explains: “Auditors want to see exactly what we’re doing on permissions – we can’t just tell them. They’ll pick someone at random and ask to see a detailed report of everything that person has permission to access. Egnyte’s Secure & Govern tool makes that very easy.”

Benefits: Better Performance, Compliance, and Client Satisfaction

Since migrating to Egnyte, Tilt has asserted far greater control over its data environment, securing its internal operations and pleasing its clients from both an operational and compliance perspective. “I love how easy it is to run permissions reports with Egnyte,” Trownsell says. “Internal and external audits are easier now with the ability to demonstrate compliance.

It’s not just clients who are pleased with the change – it’s Tilt’s employees as well. “The feedback we’ve gotten from our users is that Egnyte is faster, it’s got better bandwidth, and outages are nonexistent,” Trownsell says. Moyer adds: “They’ve also told us Egnyte is so easy to use. We have a help form for users to fill out when they have any issues, but hardly anyone has needed to use it.”

Beyond compliance, Egnyte has helped Tilt deliver better work for its clients, particularly through the platform’s user activity alerts. As Moyer explains: “Before we traffic assets to a client, we set up an internal QC shuttle to make sure everything is to spec. Egnyte’s activity alerts have helped us be able to say, "this asset has been reviewed and approved, this new one was just uploaded, and this one hasn’t been touched yet.”

Tilt’s next goal with Egnyte is to implement training sessions to increase the team’s skill level in using the platform. “Egnyte has given us an opportunity to further improve our organizational practices around how we store and manage our content,” Moyer says. “It’s such a valuable opportunity, and we want everyone on our team to be able to benefit from it.”

As a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, Foghorn Therapeutics works to develop therapeutics for people living with cancer. Foghorn manages a wealth of highly sensitive scientific and financial data. To protect these assets, Foghorn needed a comprehensive data governance strategy. Egnyte served as the linchpin of those efforts.

Challenge: Data Architecture to Protect Intellectual Property

Foghorn Therapeutics originally implemented Egnyte’s core collaboration platform, with features like real-time co-editing and version control empowering dispersed stakeholders to work on the same document simultaneously. However, as more drug compounds started moving from pre-clinical testing into Phase I trials – and the company started producing more data – governance became the team’s top priority. The Foghorn team needed to build a secure and well-controlled clinical data repository to protect their intellectual property, including clinical, research, and financial data pertaining to Foghorn’s molecules and chemical structures.

Solution: Egnyte Provides Broad Visibility and Control

Foghorn’s goals for Egnyte’s Secure & Govern features were twofold: first, to build a clinical data repository that provided full visibility into the location of sensitive content; and second, to secure that content with appropriate access permissions.

Leveraging Egnyte’s standard governance policies offered a substantial level of protection for Foghorn’s financial and scientific data. Additionally, the team created custom policies in order to identify any content containing specific keywords and note the exact storage location of that content. All of this information is made available in an intuitive dashboard within the Secure & Govern tool. The team can decide if any remediation actions or retention policies are necessary based on the type and location of a given file.

Egnyte’s Customer Success and Services teams were helpful partners in establishing Foghorn’s new security model. Dan Dinu, vice president and head of IT, explains: “The Egnyte team spent significant time to understanding our data flow processes and assisting us in developing the appropriate policies. We scheduled dedicated sessions to understand the data, create the policies, and fine-tune as needed.”

The second step involved leveraging Egnyte’s permissions functionality to ensure data was only accessible to appropriate stakeholders. For this, Foghorn leverages Egnyte’s highly intuitive permission governance which includes permission control, permission browsers and robust reporting. According to Dan:

Benefits: Secure Data and Fully Informed Decision-Making

Building a secure data governance environment in Egnyte allows Foghorn to ensure that nothing is overlooked. The team always has visibility into the location of sensitive financial and scientific data so that they can swiftly apply necessary restrictions on how that content is shared and accessed.

So far, the team has created eight custom Secure & Govern policies in Egnyte to ensure this visibility is as thorough as possible. Some of these policies include scanning for specific file types (e.g., ChemDraw, SMILES files) or certain keywords (e.g., lead compounds).

Foghorn Therapeutics continues to partner with Egnyte and expand its adoption to support its growing research and clinical activities.

Dan Dinu is pleased with the decision to move forward with Egnyte. “We evaluated solutions from Box and Microsoft but found Egnyte to best meet our requirements. Our lean IT team can easily manage, monitor, and scale Egnyte as needed.”

When emerging life sciences companies come to IT services provider Pliancy, they’re looking for tech they can grow into as they move from a crawl to a sprint. For Pliancy, success depends on their ability to deliver clients the kind of flexible, cost-effective solutions they need without having to handhold every step of the way.

With Pliancy’s support, biotech companies can implement Egnyte to build cloud-hosted file management ecosystems that work just as well for five employees as for 500. As a result, they spend more time focusing on their mission and less time putting out fires.

Challenge: Clear Obstacles Impeding Client Growth

The majority of Pliancy’s clients are emerging life science companies with little to no in-house IT staff. They come to Pliancy ready to grow, but often don’t have the day-to-day technical systems in place to support that growth. For Pliancy’s team, the goal is not only to connect clients with the tools they need today, but set them up with systems that can grow with them tomorrow.

“When it’s a brand new, out-of-the-box company, that’s when we have the biggest heart-to-heart,” says David Cole, Technical Product Manager at Pliancy. “We focus on things like: What are your requirements? What do you want to be able to do in five years?”

One of the biggest challenges during these conversations, Cole says, is helping clients who have found themselves stuck with massive amounts of technical debt from previous file management vendors. “Life science companies work with CROs more and more these days,” he notes, and many that do come to him are trapped in a “spider web of permissions” that hobble their growth potential. “There’s a shared drive and the personal drive, and then there’s this other group that’s on this different shared drive.”

All of this creates plenty of growing pains for teams that want to scale their operations quickly instead of spending their time navigating complex permissions environments.

Solution: Fast, Sustainable Growth Without Costly Roadblocks

Life science companies who choose to implement Egnyte can gracefully move through each phase of their company’s growth with ease. One story that encapsulates this involves an incubator in Menlo Park, California that came to Pliancy when the team outgrew their current setup.

“When they came to us, they were in an incubator space with shared networks, spaces, and labs,” Cole explains. To help facilitate seamless collaboration during the transition to a new lab space, Pliancy helped them deploy Egnyte with role-based file access permissions, and later added Storage Sync. What began as a five-person operation quickly grew to 60. Later on, the team realized they needed extra security and governance functionality, and enlisted Pliancy’s help to upgrade to a Platform Enterprise plan. “This kind of progression is pretty common with our life science companies that start on Egnyte,” says Cole.

For clients that choose to scale with Egnyte, Pliancy says the benefits are three-fold:

• Flexibility
  As Cole explains, there are several layers to Egnyte that make it easy for companies to scale, with one of them being flexibility. “Once a client comes in, and we set up their folder structure and their per-user provisioning in Egnyte, maybe they say they want to add a lab. Well, great, they can deploy Storage Sync. Or if they say they’re getting too much storage, no problem, we can add an archiving domain. This kind of flexibility is great for companies who want to launch quickly without having to do a huge migration, which a lot of other companies would require.”
• Ease of use
  Pliancy Escalations Engineer Brandon Kimbler shared another story of a client who moved a folder by accident in Egnyte. When the help ticket came in, Egnyte made it simple to solve the problem in no time. “I have reports running daily. I checked one of the reports, found the user in five seconds and found the exact way they moved it. We were immediately able to give them peace of mind.”
• Cost and time savings
  With such easy and efficient administration, the Pliancy team says their customers are able to avoid unnecessary issues and save valuable time and money. Sales Engineer Noah Tagliaferri tells clients, “You can go with another solution besides Egnyte. But you’ll likely end up calling us more, and spending more money, when bugs or permission problems start popping up.”

Benefits: A Flexible Solution That’s Easy to Recommend

Both Pliancy and its clients benefit from Egnyte. Tagliaferri says Egnyte allows him and his Pliancy sales team to reduce excess labor and focus on more high-value work. Whether it’s pulling reports, figuring out permissions, or resolving more complex client issues, Tagliaferri says it quickly adds up to more work on his end.

Cole echoes this, explaining how Egnyte’s responsive support team not only makes the technology easy to work with, but easy to recommend to clients.

Thanks to the benefits for everyone involved, Kimbler says Egnyte will continue to be a “simple, safe, and flexible” go-to for Pliancy’s life science clients moving forward. “Egnyte has proven perfect for helping new companies build an IT launch point that sets them up for success, whether in security, CRO collaboration, or any other IT need a life sciences startup may have. We fully intend to keep Egnyte at the center of our conversations with the new clients we’re bringing in.”

Kimbler ends with a few words of advice to future clients: "Egnyte makes our clients feel safe. Once we get the system set up and dialed in, they have full confidence that my team will be able to provide them the support they need, and that they’re in good hands. If you’re an ascending player in the life sciences space, I think Egnyte is the perfect cloud file sharing platform, both for where you are today and where you’ll be five years from now.”

Managing large volumes of highly sensitive client data is common for financial services firms. The question of who has access to that data matters tremendously–but provisioning access across a team of in-house employees, dozens of independent contractors, and a support vendor is a recipe for serious IT headaches if not managed correctly.
 

After swapping out Microsoft SharePoint for Egnyte, a US-based wealth management firm now has intuitive and robust security and governance functionality at their fingertips, empowering them to simplify their access management and scale securely.

Challenge: Legacy Technology Makes a Mess of Access Permissions

The primary responsibility of any financial services firm’s IT team boils down to one thing: Responsible stewardship of client data. “When onboarding clients, we gather information including insurance policies, driver’s license numbers, house deeds, and personal financial data,” the firm’s IT Manager says. “With so many stakeholders working with such sensitive data, including external folks like contractors and vendors, you need to be really careful.”

The firm has always been a Microsoft shop, with products like SharePoint and OneDrive particularly prominent in their workflows. Unfortunately, these products were far from capable of providing what they needed: granular provisioning of data access, with clear visibility into who has access to which files, and when. Stakeholders would share folders and links to documents with hardly any oversight, leading to a thicket of intertwining permissions that was excruciating to govern. If someone needed temporary access to a file, IT had to note when the person’s access was set to expire and, at that moment, manually find the document and revoke access.

“There was so little in the way of controls and governance,” the IT Manager explains, illustrating the point with an anecdote: “We had someone on our team who wanted to restrict access to a sensitive file. When he did, it automatically applied that restriction to a whole host of other folders and files that didn’t need it, because SharePoint lacked the ability to provision access at a granular level. It took us almost a month to recover from that.”

Cybersecurity was also a major concern to the IT Manager: “Microsoft accounts are really vulnerable. We just weren’t confident that our data was safe from nefarious outside attempts to access it.”

Solution: Take Control of Access Governance with Egnyte

The firm is responsible for providing SEC-compliant technology stacks to the smaller financial advisory firms they work with. They were already using Egnyte’s data protection and credential management functionality to clear that compliance bar. Now, they turned to Egnyte to shore up their data stewardship not just for outside advisors, but across the enterprise.

For the IT Manager, this move initially came as a surprise. “Microsoft is known as the IT leader, and I wasn’t sure how Egnyte would compete,” he said. “But once I saw Egnyte in action, its capabilities, and how easy it was to operate, the choice was clear.” 

Several of Egnyte’s capabilities stood out in particular:

• Permissions management 
  Egnyte enabled IT to automate the time-based revocation of file access by setting expiration dates on links to key files. The team could also provide access through groups rather than allowing individuals to change file permissions on a whim. “If someone needs access to a certain file, I can just add them to the right group and they can have what they need,” the IT Manager explains. “And we can run reports to get a full picture of access history.”
• Linking Egnyte and Practifi via Salesforce integration
  During onboarding, the firm sends new clients a secure link through which they can upload all their onboarding data into Egnyte. Thanks to Egnyte’s Salesforce integration, the advisor bringing on the client can automatically access that data in Practifi, a Salesforce OEM partner the firm has implemented. This eliminates the separate effort of setting up the proper permissions for the rep to access the data directly through Egnyte. As the IT Manager says: “One advisor may have hundreds of clients. That adds up to lots of overhead that the integration eliminates.” The team also uses onboarding links when bringing on new advisory firms.
• Automated security alerts
  The firm has chosen to keep some data on OneDrive. Fortunately, Egnyte is able to monitor not only their OneDrive repository, but also Exchange emails, and send alerts for suspicious attempts to access it–an invaluable feature given the vulnerability of their Microsoft accounts. “We got alerts from Egnyte about hacking attempts that neither Microsoft nor our third-party vendor detected,” says the IT Manager. “That visibility is critical for us.”

Benefits: A Path to Continued Growth, Free of IT Obstacles

Since expanding their use of Egnyte, the company has assumed full control over the security and governance of their data. They’ve eliminated time-consuming auditing and troubleshooting work related to access permissions. And they’ve paved the way for accelerated company growth.

The IT Manager is happy with the results. “Egnyte’s Secure and Govern capabilities have been huge. We now have so much more control over the provisioning of data access. And if we ever have a question about access to a certain folder, we can just run a quick report and see exactly who has access to what.”

On the security side, the alerts about nefarious access attempts have prompted the team to build additional barriers around their environments, taking their security posture to new heights. The IT Manager describes how exceptional Egnyte has been in this area: “Egnyte gives me a dashboard where I can see exactly when login attempts have occurred and where they originated from – Russia, 6:00 AM yesterday, et cetera. It’s so informative that our third-party support vendor has been asking me to show them data on account login attempts, rather than the other way around.”

Throughout the IT Manager’s experience, Egnyte has been by his side for whatever data governance and security needs may arise. “With Microsoft, we could wait weeks for a response on a support ticket. With Egnyte, it comes within 48 hours. And the Professional Services folks were so helpful in getting us set up. Our staff had such a smooth experience transitioning from the old system. I’ve seen other new technology implementations cause a lot of frustration, but not Egnyte.”

The firm is now looking to expand their use of Egnyte to include other features like automated workflows, Copilot, and external backups to AWS S3. In the meantime, with access permissions and security under control, their main focus is on building upon their growth momentum. As the IT Manager puts it: “We’ve doubled in size, and as we add more clients and advisors, Egnyte keeps the wind at our back.”

Honor Health Network, a fast-growing network of community-oriented healthcare services, was up to its ears in paper. From patient forms to job applications, the company relied on physical folders storing paper documents, with chaotic results in content management, organization, and the allocation of office space.

That all changed when the company partnered with Jotform, a web-based form builder, and Egnyte, a provider of cloud-hosted content management software. Through the elegant integration of their two services, Jotform and Egnyte digitized Honor Health’s forms and cloud-enabled its workflows, streamlining operations for 10,000 users across countless offices and patient homes.

Challenge: Find a Digital Alternative for Messy Paper Workflows

Honor Health’s reliance on paper created numerous inefficiencies that caused the amount of time the team spent on document management to balloon. It also posed serious risks of document loss and threats to data integrity.

“To share documents among our different offices and home health aides, people would have to drive from place to place to pick up their files. Less tech-savvy staff members and patients would even print out forms, fill them out, and drive to their local library to fax them in,” explains Kayla S., Service Center Manager at Honor Health Network. “Then there’s the human error issue. Files would get lost. Offices would fill up with file cabinets containing documents that were often poorly organized. Missing or incorrect data would go undetected until the next audit. This forced us to spend valuable time chasing people down and correcting mistakes.”

It was clear that, to gain better control over their files and make better use of their time, Honor Health would need to digitize. However, not just any digital solution would suffice. “As a health network, a lot of our files contain people’s PHI, PII, and other highly sensitive data,” says Matt Koveleski, Director of IT at Honor Health. “We needed something cloud-based and secure, so that we could see and control who has access to what documents and so people wouldn’t have to rely on VPN connections to access data from other offices or patients’ homes.”

Solution: Digitize Forms with Jotform, Manage in Egnyte

Honor Health had previously implemented Egnyte’s cloud-based content management system as a replacement for a physical server the team was using for active directory. “We used to have to attach a SonicWall VPN client to home aides’ and office workers’ computers, and Egnyte freed us from that,” explains Koveleski. To digitize their forms, Honor Health kicked off a two-pronged plan that involved integrating Egnyte with Jotform. Jotform embeds forms directly into websites and apps for easy online submission, nullifying the need for paper forms. When a patient, staff member, or job applicant submits a form, Jotform automatically sends the submitted data into Egnyte, where it can be managed intuitively, securely, and efficiently.

“Jotform offers tons of features, like Jotform Tables and Approvals, that really reduce the time it takes people to fill out forms,” comments Kayla. “For example, conditional logic condenses forms based on the answers people enter. When someone enters their mailing address, they can check a box that says it’s the same as their home address, and the home address field disappears. The conditional logic feature can also automatically route an email based on the office of the form filler, which is huge.”

Jotform also enabled patients and aides to complete and submit forms remotely from their mobile devices — a major benefit for a company that largely provides care at patients’ homes rather than in the office. “People can access forms via a Jotform link without needing their own account or login, and fill them out on their personal devices,” Kayla explains. “That way, we don’t have to email forms for people to print out, complete, and fax back to us.”

Once forms are submitted, Egnyte organizes and displays them in a simple folder structure that appears on users’ desktops as a common mapped file drive. This made finding and accessing files easy — even for less tech-savvy users. “If someone wants to see how many people completed a form, they can find the form within Egnyte very quickly and easily,” says Kayla.

It wasn’t just easy to find and access files. Egnyte enabled team members to share files securely as well — a critical capability for a company that handles so much sensitive data. “With Egnyte, I can control exactly who has access to which folders, and disable access at any time,” explains Koveleski. “Egnyte also alerts me to anomalies, like someone accessing a file from outside the country or someone deleting large amounts of data. There are times when we need to provide someone, including third parties, access to PHI, so it’s great to have the visibility to ensure everything is handled properly.”

Benefits: The IT Workflow Necessary for Successful Acquisitions

Since integrating Egnyte and Jotform, Honor Health Network has created efficiencies that have improved the user experience for patients and employees alike. As Kayla puts it: “The office staff is happier because they don’t have to spend time searching through file cabinets for a particular file or chasing people down to correct mistakes. Home aides are happier because it’s much easier to get forms completed and submitted. And the simple folder structure Egnyte provides means we don’t have to give everyone extra training on navigating the backend of Jotform to find files.”

The team has also enjoyed the peace of mind that all stakeholders are able to manage files securely. “Egnyte and Jotform Enterprise in combination are such a powerful force for improving our workflows,” says Koveleski. “Egnyte’s Secure and Govern features help us manage how content is shared, and Jotform’s HIPAA-specific forms allow us to keep tabs on exactly where sensitive HIPAA information is stored. Things are fast, easy, and secure across the board.”

The new workflow has even helped facilitate Honor Health’s continued growth by accelerating the process of applying for jobs there. “Applying to work with us previously involved filling out and signing each individual form in a 20-page packet,” Kayla says. “Now that it’s digitized in Jotform Enterprise, all someone has to do is enter a piece of information once and it replicates across every form where that information is needed. After it’s submitted, Egnyte makes it easy for HR to organize and access each person’s application materials.”

The Honor Health team expects the integrated solution to be a major part of their workflow going forward. “I loved Egnyte right when I saw it, and our CEO did too,” Koveleski says. “And Jotform Enterprise has been absolutely indispensable. Putting the two together is all we could ever ask for.”