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.

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.

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.

Compliance frameworks provide guidelines for effective and secure operations for content management across a company’s various repositories. They’re written as a set of controls, each one which corresponds to different settings and policies that an organization must follow in order to ensure the safety of their data.