The File Sharing Dilemma (a.k.a. It's 3am do you know where your content is?)

You’re in IT management. Let me ask what keeps you up at night? Standard stuff like health and retirement savings? Or, is it that new hire in marketing? The one leaving the office every night with confidential campaign plans copied to a flash drive. Or maybe it’s the R&D manager who’s using public file sync and sharing services to transfer sensitive product development specs between their work and home computers?

If either of those scenarios is familiar, that’s what you should be stressing over. And for a couple of reasons: At the most basic level, that’s your organization’s critical information‑it’s lifeblood‑out there roaming beyond the firewall. At a higher level, it also means your enterprise probably doesn't have a secure, compliant, user-friendly file sync and share solution integrated into its ECM platform.

You’re not alone. If it makes you feel any better, many organizations are struggling to adapt to a rapidly evolving work environment that now encompasses anywhere, anytime, and on any device. 

To help put the changing landscape in perspective, here are some results I've pulled together from a few surveys:

•  65% of respondents have accessed work-related data on their mobile device, though only 10% have corporate-issued devices. Shockingly, over 50% said access to their devices wasn't password protected.
• 78% of companies say the number of personal devices connecting to their networks has doubled over the past two years. However, less than 10% are fully aware of which devices are logging in.
•  93% of companies without an enterprise file sync and share platform say their employees are specifically using Dropbox, despite (or, more likely, unaware of) several recently documented security issues.

BYOx has Arrived. What’s Your Response?

Fact is, companies are expecting more out of their employees, and resourceful staff are doing their best to deliver. So much so that the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is quickly morphing into BYOx, where “x” is defined as whatever’s necessary to get the job done‑devices, applications, web services, cloud storage, and more. Good on the staff for showing initiative, but it’s now all on the infrastructure architects to provide them with a secure, productive sandbox to play in.

I’m not alone in saying that adopting an “anything goes” policy for external information sharing and storage is a no-win proposition. It results in an inefficient, tangled mess for users and gruesome security and governance risks for information guardians. There really is only one, true win-win in this new world, and it’s in the form of a cohesive, dedicated file sync and sharing application that’s built from the ground up with inherent security and compliance to excel at all three aspects of the corporate sync-and-share paradigm: Usability, Governance and Security. 

The Best of All File Sharing Worlds is in One Simple Solution

So, at the most basic level, it seems there are two paths to meeting the demands of the next-gen workforce and workplace. Sadly, one involves trying to grow a business through public file sync and sharing tools created for non-business use. Tools that are incompatible with your tech environment, ask you to rely on someone else’s definition of security, and can’t tell you where your data’s been hanging out.

Truth is, solutions like OpenText Tempo Box are the foundation for the future. Tempo Box is built on an ECM infrastructure and operates in the cloud, on-premise, or as a hybrid model that incorporates both. It’s time to take the leap and implement a true enterprise-grade, sync-and-share solution that effortlessly brings the best advantages of external file sync and sharing‑ content creation, collaboration, and storage‑back behind the firewall and into a secure, governable structure where it belongs. I guarantee you’ll sleep better. Try Tempo Box today!