The recent pandemic has created challenges for organizations adapting to a largely—and often unexpectedly—remote workforce. This situation has increased the demand for robust security and governance solutions, which Egnyte is addressing through the introduction of new features designed to assist businesses with file management during this period.

Egnyte provides its clients with the ability to manage files regardless of their location—whether on company servers or within cloud environments. Throughout its development, the company has integrated security and governance tools to unify file collaboration with security and compliance features on a single, comprehensive platform.

“The swift transition to remote work has, in my opinion, spurred widespread adoption of numerous applications across various cloud platforms,” stated Vineet Jain, co-founder and CEO of Egnyte. “This has been accompanied by a disproportionate increase in concerns surrounding data security and governance.”

Today’s announcements from Egnyte are a direct response to the changes brought about by COVID-19, incorporating both entirely new functionalities and features that were already planned, but expedited to address the evolving technological demands.

What’s new?

The company is rolling out a novel capability known as Smart Cache, designed to ensure frequently accessed content – regardless of its location – is readily available to individual users when required.

According to Jain, “Smart Cache leverages machine learning to forecast the content users are most likely to need at any given location, eliminating the need for administrators to predict usage trends. A key benefit of this approach is its seamless operation, remaining entirely transparent to end users.” This functionality has the potential to reduce both storage expenses and bandwidth consumption by delivering content automatically and only when it’s actively needed.

A further addition is the implementation of email scanning and governance features. Jain highlights that email frequently represents a company’s largest data repository, yet simultaneously serves as a common entry point for phishing schemes and malicious software. Consequently, Egnyte is introducing a tool to monitor email content, detect known malware and ransomware, and prevent the distribution of potentially harmful files.

As organizations increasingly share files across different locations, it’s crucial that security and governance rules accompany those files, ensuring consistent policy enforcement wherever they are accessed. This need existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has been significantly amplified by the rise in remote work arrangements.

Egnyte is also employing machine learning to automatically categorize documents, enabling the application of policies without manual intervention. By automatically recognizing document types – whether they contain personal data, budgetary information, or strategic plans – Egnyte assists customers in classifying and applying appropriate viewing and sharing restrictions to safeguard confidential information.

These platform updates are a direct response to evolving market demands. While the pandemic has accelerated these developments, organizations managing documents across multiple sites can realize benefits from these features irrespective of current circumstances.

The company currently exceeds $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and experienced 22% growth in the first half of 2020. It remains to be seen whether the company can maintain or increase this growth rate in the second half of 2020. Nevertheless, Egnyte is emerging as a potential candidate for an initial public offering (IPO) in 2021, contingent on favorable market conditions.