Egnyte: Safeguarding sensitive information while fuelling business growth on Google Cloud
About Egnyte
Egnyte is a secure multi-cloud platform for content security and governance that enables organizations to better protect and collaborate on their most valuable content. Democratizing cloud content security, Egnyte helps customers improve data security, maintain compliance, prevent and detect ransomware threats, and boost employee productivity on any app, any cloud, anywhere.
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Contact usEgnyte migrated from on-premises data centers to run exclusively on Google Cloud to support its steady growth while helping its clients manage their data risks, whilst avoiding any disruption to its services.
Google Cloud results
- Keeps services running 24/7 with high speed and reliability with workloads securely distributed across multiple regions
- Ensures high performance with a highly provisioned, low-latency network
- Supports innovation with built-in services that simplify business processes, freeing up employees to focus on value-added tasks
Migrated to Google Cloud without impacting services.
Today, content resides in more places than ever. It's being stored, accessed, and shared on countless devices, servers and clouds, revolutionizing the way we work but also potentially increasing the risk exposure and leading many businesses to ask: 'Where exactly is my most valuable and sensitive content? Who's accessing it? And how are they using and sharing it?' Enter Egnyte, who is helping businesses answer these questions.
Founded in 2007, Egnyte offers an all-in-one content security and governance cloud-based file sharing solution with centralized visibility and control over a company's content across every cloud and device. By harnessing machine learning to uncover critical risks, the platform replaces manual data management chores with automated workflows so businesses can quickly address and contain cyber threats. More than 16,000 companies worldwide trust Egnyte to protect their data, business, and customers while fueling productivity.
"Businesses need to make their data as easily accessible as possible for employees so it doesn't hinder their productivity, while also guarding it from the wrong people, preventing data leaks and cyber vulnerabilities. "This is not a trivial problem to solve," says Frank Sicilia, CIO, Egnyte. To help clients navigate this conundrum, Egnyte has added a layer of security, governance, and audit trail to its original content storage and collaboration offerings. "We're not alone in offering a solution like this, but we are unique in the depth of our offering because our governance platform can integrate with any other solution clients use to handle their data, extending our security, auditability, and high availability across the business," he explains.
To deliver these services to clients 24/7, Egnyte originally ran its own data centers: two in the USA and one in Europe. But as the company continued its steady growth, owning and managing its own data centers no longer worked as a long-term solution, as they could not provide the necessary scalability. Sicilia and his team also wanted to introduce another layer of reliability to the business by collaborating with a cloud provider to back up its data. "Although we could copy things from one data center to another as a backup, we chose to get a professional third-party provider involved and that's how our relationship with Google Cloud started," he explains.
Building the groundwork for scalability and business success
As a company that gains thousands of new customers each year, Egnyte found planning for data center scalability challenging. "Eventually, having our own data centers was going to negatively impact our business, so we looked for alternatives: we examined the offerings of all cloud providers available, did our due diligence, and found that in every category that we analyzed, Google Cloud was hands-down the winner," says Sicilia.
These categories include the reach of the network, considering that Egnyte serves clients across all continents. "Google Cloud is the only cloud provider we're working with, and one of the reasons is because its network is second to none," he says. "Google has its own transoceanic fiber with points of presence in all markets where we're currently doing business as well as markets where we intend to do business in the future."
Another important criteria for Egnyte was flexibility, so the company could weigh up the financial risks of moving its data and workloads from on-premises to cloud. "Once complete, the bottom line impact of a big migration like this is significant. But the financial risks can be significant as well because, for a while, we needed to pay for both our new cloud infrastructure and our old on-premises one while they overlap during the migration," explains Sicilia. "Google Cloud was able to put together an offering that made it easier for us to de-risk this migration."
"Eventually, having our own data centers was going to negatively impact our business so we looked for alternatives: we examined the offerings of all cloud providers available, did our due diligence, and found that in every category that we examined, Google was hands-down the winner."
—Frank Sicilia, CIO, EgnyteMigrating to the cloud without disrupting services
In December 2021, Egnyte completed its full migration onto Google Cloud. One of the measures of its success is the fact that it did not disrupt its services to any of the thousands of customers who rely on the Egnyte platform to store and manage their data securely. The company was able to maintain its strict SLAs in terms of latency and availability with a no-impact, smooth migration. "This was our first rodeo, but Google Cloud has helped hundreds of customers move to the cloud before and so they were able to anticipate some of the problems we'd likely be facing and helped us overcome them. Our close collaboration was one of the main reasons why we pulled this off so successfully," says Sicilia.
With its last data center shut down in February 2022, Egnyte has noticed significant changes to business processes and performance as a result of operating on the cloud. The most notable, shares Sicilia, revolves around capacity planning, which used to be Egnyte's biggest on-premises challenge: "Planning for customers we don't have yet is now a problem of the past. We no longer need to buy additional resources a year in advance, wait for them to be shipped, and hope that they'll suffice. We can now simply spin up new resources on Google Cloud as needed."
Another advantage of using Google Cloud is the optimization of Egnyte's platform, which is no longer limited to the hardware the company invested in years before. "Relying on aging infrastructure is a very limiting factor when you're developing and engineering a platform as complex as Egnyte," explains Sicilia. "Migrating to the cloud eliminated that issue because our entire platform is now always operating on the latest storage, processing, network, and services available on Google Cloud."
"Relying on aging infrastructure is a very limiting factor when you're developing and engineering a platform as complex as Egnyte. Migrating to the cloud eliminated that issue because our entire platform is now always operating on the latest and greatest storage, processing, network, and services available on Google Cloud."
—Frank Sicilia, CIO, EgnyteLooking forward to more innovation
With its new infrastructure in place, Egnyte is now leveraging Google Cloud services to support its business processes, instead of building or buying them as a commodity. "One unexpected advantage of our migration is the fact that we have services embedded into our infrastructure such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Memorystore for Redis. This wasn't something that we were originally planning on using because we used to make these services for ourselves," explains Sicilia. "But having them available on Google Cloud means we no longer need to shop, figure out new solutions, install them, and build them into the product and company work flow. There is a long list of Google Cloud services that have significantly simplified our processes and that now support our flagship products Egnyte Collaborate and Egnyte Secure and Govern."
Using Google Cloud services to build the control plane of its products, Egnyte offers customers the same UI experience and controls for governing documents wherever they reside. "If you learn how to use governance with Egnyte, those same rules, principles, and interface are applicable to SharePoint file servers, Box, Dropbox, and other third-party offerings. So if you have data, we can help you govern it, no matter where it is sitting," explains Sicilia.
Looking ahead, Egnyte aims to continue leveraging cloud technology to provide clients with a data governance platform that supports their business success in the long run. Egnyte already protects thousands of companies' most sensitive information with a portfolio of solutions that place a focus on security, including safeguards for data privacy, CMMC, Ransomware detection, classification, governance, and more. "Moving to Google Cloud means we can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our clients," says Sicilia. "So whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud, any app, anywhere in the world, we're always there for them."
"Moving to Google Cloud means we can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our clients. So whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud, any app, anywhere in the world, we're always there for them."
—Frank Sicilia, CIO, EgnyteTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Egnyte
Egnyte is a secure multi-cloud platform for content security and governance that enables organizations to better protect and collaborate on their most valuable content. Democratizing cloud content security, Egnyte helps customers improve data security, maintain compliance, prevent and detect ransomware threats, and boost employee productivity on any app, any cloud, anywhere.