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.

Chaos is never good for business, but the reality is that it’s the state in which many companies live on a daily basis. The global pandemic shut down offices and dispersed workforces to employees’ homes and other socially-distanced locations. Without data governance plans to support remote workers, employees scavenged for, and used, tools and processes that helped them get their jobs done, often with little regard for long-time implications or risk to the company.

In the early days of SharePoint, installing a free version was fairly straight-forward and simple, and once in place, it would quickly catch on and spread across a single team, then expand between teams, and soon could be seen throughout the entire organization. In those early waves of growth, few paid much attention to the growing sprawl of sites and content.

Offsites are a big part of remote teams. They allow everyone to socialize, connect more deeply with coworkers, and help build shared experiences and empathy. Even if video calls are a great tool to share information, they can be tiring. It's too easy to miss non-verbal cues. Chance encounters over coffee never happen, and we don’t always experience the same personal connections that come from small-talk.

Today, we are excited to be launching the Egnyte Content Services Platform, the evolution of our industry-leading content collaboration and data governance technologies, to help organizations address the issues they face and allow for effective deployment of secure content services. The Platform is a major step forward in the progression of how companies create, use, transact, and manage their critical data.

Picture your workspace at the office from ten, five, or even two years ago—what has changed? Your computer likely occupies less space than it did in the past. Your office phone, which was once wired to the corner of your desk, now sits comfortably in your pocket. And you are probably working at home exclusively, or at least most of the time.

The goal of every life sciences company is to improve the lives of patients by getting their product to market. To do so often requires successfully completing a clinical trial. It goes without saying, however, that keeping the resulting data secure and compliant is paramount. Restricting access to only those that need it is an essential first step, but there is much more that needs to be done.

Businesses have long relied on Egnyte’s hybrid technology for low-latency access to large files in bandwidth-constrained environments, and to ensure business continuity during internet outages. By syncing cloud content to a local storage device, hybrid architecture enables caching close to the user, which offers major benefits for customers who need cloud-scale connectivity with on-prem performance.

As more and more businesses were forced to move to the cloud with the COVID-19 crisis, content and data have proliferated across devices, users, apps, and locations as a result of the new, mass work-from-anywhere reality. This brought a growing set of challenges to prevent data silos and content sprawl while remaining compliant with data regulations and governance.

The COVID-19 crisis has been a test of management and leadership. Recent weeks have seen business leaders grappling with the dramatic upheaval to normal business operations and the corresponding changes to managing people and maintaining productivity. But as companies emerge from shelter-in-place, the question of “what does it take to lead a business through the recovery phase?” is on every leader’s mind.