Article Written by Chanel Chambers, Director of Product Marketing, Citrix
Top EFSS Predictions for
2016
1.
The increasing importance of data sovereignty
Enterprises
today face increasing challenges meeting the various compliance and regulatory
requirements applicable to them. This burden is significantly increased if the
enterprise has operations in various geographies or across different verticals.
For instance, an e-commerce vendor with global customers' needs to comply with
data privacy and disclosure mandates such as the EU Data protection directive,
California privacy laws and PCI-DSS. Moreover, as a response to the economic
crises, more regulatory and compliance mandates are expected as governments and
regulatory bodies shore up requirements in an attempt to prevent future
incidents. Additionally, employee mobility, work shifting and BYO devices are
putting pressure on IT organizations, along with the need to leverage existing
investments, protect intellectual property and meet regulatory compliance
requirements.
With this growing global workforce, comes the need to collaborate and share
data with other employees, 3rd parties, customers, partners; and the
limitations of currently deployed consumer-style file sharing solutions further
adds to the complexity. Consumer-style file sharing usage poses serious risks
for the enterprise with data loss, violation of regulatory rules, and places
data outside of IT control. Yet along
with the benefits that cloud computing offers as a new way of delivering
computing resources instantly, on-demand and inexpensively, likewise, we
envision governments will continue seeking cloud-solutions as a way to help
meet compliance requirements.
2.
The demand for hybrid solutions
There's no question that cloud computing
has revolutionized the industry, capturing the attention of business and IT
leaders, and causing them to reevaluate their IT strategies. Yet with flexible
cloud services solutions, organizations can now select which applications and
usage scenarios fit best in their private cloud, and which fit best in a public
cloud, enabling them to flex, grow and transform to meet the demands of the
modern workplace. Hybrid clouds combine the benefits of building private and
public clouds as well as leveraging existing IT infrastructure to cut costs,
maximize value and modernize the way IT services are delivered.
Here at Citrix, we see cloud services solutions as a way to enable
organizations to ensure the best security, performance and reliability whether
workloads run in the datacenter or in an external cloud. By allowing IT to
deliver every application workload at scale and with simplicity, your
organization can capitalize on all of the benefits that cloud computing has to
offer. No matter whether the apps and data live on-premises or off-premises,
your users will still get the same great experience.
3. The
maturation of tools for responsible collaboration
We anticipate that 2016 will be a big year for enabling
document workflows to enhance collaboration. Enterprises are already seeking a
single solution that goes beyond addressing their mobility needs. Yet they are
also looking for a single solution to help drive workflows, such as approval
chains, and enhances collaboration. Enterprises are seeking a collaborative
workspace where anyone can securely exchange, track, edit and e-sign content,
making it fast, easy and a secure way to obtain electronic signatures on
important documents - all from one interface.
Additionally, work teams increasingly
span organizations and third parties play a greater role in business, including
partners, suppliers, agencies, outsourcing providers and contractors. This
creates the need for people to be able to share files easily with anyone inside
or outside the organization-without exposing the enterprise network to risk. A
complete file sharing and sync service for the enterprise should provide the
ability to securely access and share files, including file shares inside the
network, with anyone, anywhere. In turn, IT organizations desire the ability to
allow their employees-including trusted third parties-to access and share files
from anywhere. Yet granular access controls and security policies, including
device security policies, must also be defined for both employees and third-party
users through the same service. Key capabilities include the ability to require
a log-in with defined password complexity for each user account, restrict the
number of downloads available to a given user, restrict upload and download
permissions for users added to team folders, and expire links to files whenever
desired.
4. The need
for a complete solution for document-centric workflows
IT managers are looking for a single solution that will allow them to enable
workflows and enhance collaboration for their organization. For these IT
managers, being able to provide employees a collaborative workspace where
anyone can securely exchange, track, edit and e-sign content through a single
interface we feel is going to be critical in the coming year. For enterprises
in particular, this will be important, as they are aren't just looking for a
single solution that goes beyond addressing mobility needs, but also supports
requirements that drive workflows, such as approval chains and the trend
towards enterprise "home drives."
5. The perpetual requirement for total security
Enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, need to be able
to control file sharing based on the content inside the files themselves to
enforce sharing restrictions per company policies. As such, IT organizations
are looking for complete solutions that can be fully integrated with existing
security infrastructure and policies. Additionally, these IT organizations are
also looking to enforce data security policies for sensitive and confidential
data. By integrating EFSS solutions with existing DLP (data loss prevention)
systems, will allow companies to restrict document sharing based on the file's
DLP classification. As such, it is important that these EFSS solutions
integrate easily with popular DLP systems. Soon
after we introduced ShareFile Enterprise with StorageZones, for example, our partners Digital Guardian and Code
Green Networks developed solutions to
mitigate the risk of data leakage by leveraging ShareFile APIs to move or
revoke access to files that contained sensitive information. But if your
security team had already standardized on a different on-premises security
suite, you had either to manage two sets of DLP policies or accept the risk of
sensitive data going out via ShareFile. Documents stored in your on-premises
StorageZone can be examined by any third-party DLP security suite that supports
ICAP, a standard network protocol for inline content scanning. Sharing and
access privileges can then be adjusted based on the results of the DLP scan and
your preferences for how strictly you want to control access.
Additionally, data security is top of
mind for IT departments and often the key reason our customers choose our EFSS
solution. Nowhere is this topic more relevant today than in discussions
involving enterprise mobility and data sharing. Our file sync-and-share
solution for the enterprise makes it easy to exchange information with third
parties-sometimes too easy. Users should not be allowed to share files broadly
when they contain sensitive information like credit card numbers, personally
identifying information or intellectual property. For health care
organizations, limiting the spread of protected health information (PHI) is the
core requirement for HIPAA compliance. For premise-based systems like corporate
e-mail and web proxy servers, outbound information can be checked at the
network edge and the egress of sensitive data, accidental or intentional, can
be prevented. But when you send a file as a hyperlink instead of an attachment,
the existing systems are bypassed and your security team loses visibility into
what is leaving the network.
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About the Author
Chanel Chambers -
Director of Product Marketing
Chanel Chambers joined Citrix in 2015 to grow
the ShareFile Enterprise business.
Prior to Citrix, she held multiple roles in
marketing and sales at Microsoft, where she helped to drive the launch of
Windows 7 worldwide, and was responsible for corporate revenue and deployment
metrics for the Windows business in the United States.
Chambers holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from
Oberlin College, a Master of Science degree from North Carolina State
University, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chanelchambers