Web design trends come and go at a dizzying pace these days. While it might be easy to completely redo a simple website or a web application, visual design is not often a top priority for large-scale enterprise applications. But even with larger applications, there comes a time when the system’s look and feel becomes dated and the user experience is just not at the level it might be. And it directly impacts customers. It’s probably time for a refresh!

In August 2020, Egnyte partnered with Wakefield Research to survey 400 C-Level IT executives from across the U.S.* to understand how the remote work revolution is changing their governance strategies, and what they’re doing to get ahead of this sea change.

Ransomware attacks have become the most common security threat faced by businesses today. A recent report from TrustWave indicates that the number of ransomware attacks quadrupled last year; this type of attack now accounts for more than 20% of all digital security incidents. It’s now more common than even credit card theft.

We’ve all been subjected to quaint media features that try to make business leaders seem like a joyful walk on the beach. They usually have a title like, “A Day in the Life of the CIO,” and they are laden with tropes that try to make the person relatable (“…and at 9:34 am, I finally get around to drinking that latte I got at Starbucks on the way into work!”), but truly the whole thing is just an annoying ploy to make you feel inadequate.

If you’re like most people, you spend far too much time repeating manual tasks. Tasks like saving email attachments, tagging files and writing simple emails are probably not the best use of your talent and energy. Multiply all that work by the number of people in your organization, and you get a clear, if alarming, picture of how much time is wasted on non-essential tasks.

With all the email, documents, Slack messages, and other artifacts that come through my purview each day, I think the language gods will forgive me for a few typos. But I would hate to think that a keystroke error could result in an irrecoverable breach of my company’s most private data. Seems a bit dramatic, no? According to a recent Forbes article, Dropbox users face this very issue when sharing sensitive data.

An unsecured AWS S3 bucket with 5.5 million business files was recently discovered by security researchers at vpnMentor. All of these files were publicly available without any password protection or other security protocols attached to them. This kind of thing happens regularly with cloud service providers, and it often occurs when IT teams neglect to set security and compliance rules within their cloud environments.

I sometimes wish someone with gravitas had said, “There is no content without security.” That would have looked good coming from Churchill or Lincoln. But their lack of foresight about content services doesn’t diminish a very important fact, one that carries its own brand of import: the importance of security and governance for a company’s critical data.

Sprawl happens when anyone and everyone can create a site or team, usually without oversight, planning, or any kind of formal training, resulting in dozens/hundreds of rarely used or abandoned sites and teams, a poorly-performing search experience, and your intellectual property (content and conversations) spread across multiple locations each with a maze of chats, files, and channels.

Last year, Capital One showed the world why data governance is so important when it was the victim of a massive data breach that exposed the personal data of 106 million customers. It is still one of the biggest hacks ever recorded, and the company has now been fined $80 million by banking regulators. A “what’s in your wallet” meme would work great here, but let’s keep this classy.