Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Kris Lahiri, Chief Security Officer, Egnyte (Part 1)

Excellent conversation about the security aspects of content and data and the evolution of shadow IT.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Egnyte and yourself. Bear in mind that we have been covering Egnyte for a while. The audience have some idea. We are going to talk about Egnyte today in the context of cyber security.

Kris Lahiri: I’m a Co-Founder and the Chief Security Officer at Egnyte. Egnyte is a modern content platform that is purpose-built for business. Egnyte gives IT centralized control and protection over files. All users of Egnyte have fast access, no matter where they work or how work happens. That’s a very brief overview of Egnyte.

We are headquartered in Mountain View. We have over
15,000 customers from over 120 countries worldwide. We have different types of customers across different types of verticals. Specifically in context of cyber security, we have some of the most challenging and demanding workloads in terms of where some of these customers originate and what they need for their content security.

Egnyte has been the only platform that they trust or they started to trust over the years. Some of them have tried different solutions. The type of solution that Egnyte provides is available in general. Once we start talking about specific use cases of where a customer uses it, there’re a lot of things that we can double-click on.

Sramana Mitra: The primary function of Egnyte is cloud storage?

Kris Lahiri: We really call this a content platform. When we first started in 2007, cloud storage was the main driver. They just needed another location to keep their files. Very quickly, it evolved into a content platform. I would say even right now, the main use case of Egnyte is content collaboration.

Sramana Mitra: What are the functions of content platform besides storage? How do you distinguish that? That will help me probe the security angle accordingly.

Kris Lahiri: It’s really about centralized control. Let’s assume that it was being done outside of Egnyte. Right now, people use the collaboration tool that’s most easily available whether it’s email or some type of a private drive. That seems to be the default way in which people start to collaborate. Based on the type of company, this becomes very cumbersome. Some people don’t mind. They aren’t really sharing that much critical information. In many cases, that’s just fine.

Where Egnyte starts to shine is in how we provide that same capability from our platform. It’s centralized control and overall data protection and governance. There are lots of details there that we can cover. Also, the ability to integrate with certain key workflows that different companies have.

For example, large companies nowadays require DLP. Some just want an easy way to be able to collaborate with third-parties and not having to take on the onus of integrating all of their users into their own active directory or identity management. They don’t want to burn an Okta license for every third-party they want to collaborate with.

At the same time, they don’t just open up the doors and say it’s all open game. That type of a platform which provides a customer a really unique and secure way of collaborating, working with each other, and defining other workflows and policies is what Egnyte primarily does.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Kris Lahiri, Chief Security Officer, Egnyte
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