By Venkat Ramasamy, COO/VP Marketing, FileCloud

Increased Complexity in the Cloud

It's now been more than a year since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. It was a huge wake-up call to businesses around the world and spurred a new focus on data retention.

California quickly followed with the California Consumer Privacy Act, and according to Law.com, every state in the U.S. has recently either introduced their own data privacy legislation or amended its data breach notification laws. More than 80 countries have laws on the books around data protection.

That means companies of every size must put vigilance around the data they own and control at the top of their agenda. At the same time, consumers are becoming more aware of how businesses collect and use their data. That makes a company's choice of cloud partners a monumental decision, one that encompasses regulations, security, even geopolitics. 

With that in mind, here are three enterprise file sharing trends I'm keeping an eye on for 2020:

Threats to Cloud Security

The major cloud providers-Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform-are becoming incredibly complex to manage. Tracking down bugs across a vast system is difficult and you often don't get the metrics you need to resolve issues quickly. Whenever you have an incredibly complex system, disaster is just around the corner. Any kind of disruption in one place can have a downstream effect somewhere else.

What would happen if AWS went down for a couple of days? You wouldn't be able to access your bank, use many of the online tools that are an essential part of your job or even get to the sites you use to keep in touch with friends and family. So you need to make sure you have a proper system to protect your infrastructure in case of large-scale outages.

To minimize vulnerabilities, businesses must assume responsibility for protecting data both internally (in on-premise servers and infrastructures) and with the cloud provider. Moving the workload to the cloud doesn't relieve you of your responsibility for security. You're still responsible for security in both places.

One Company + Multiple Cloud Providers = Added Complexity

Many companies are storing their data in multiple different SaaS apps. Data is scattered across Slack, Office365, Google Drive, Salesforce, and more, not to mention AWS and a company's own on-premise servers. This adds complexity in managing documents and data. How do you protect your data across all these locations? Are you even sure where all your data is? A central management hub-a "single pane of glass"-will rise to make data protection easier across all these locations.

Focus Shifts from User Experience to Privacy and Governance

As it has grown, the enterprise file sharing market has promoted user experience as a selling point. It was important to show how easily you could share content from all of its different repositories. But stricter data privacy regulations-and the steep fines that accompany them-will force a focus on protecting information. Capabilities that scan and warn you about sensitive content before you share it will become more prominent. Without those types of warnings, you lose visibility of the data you're responsible for governing.

The penalties are already starting to add up. After a huge breach in 2017, Equifax agreed to a $575 million fine, while over in the UK, British Airways was hit with a record $230 million fine earlier this year, and Marriott was fined $124 million not long after. Unless companies begin to get control of their data, those numbers will continue to soar.

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About the Author

Venkat Ramasamy leads business strategy, partnerships and marketing functions at CodeLathe. He comes with over 15 years of experience as a Product Development Manager at Schlumberger and as a Product Manager at Garmin. Venkat holds a MBA from UT Austin and a Master of Science in Information Systems from Texas Tech University.