Part of what it means for AvePoint to be enterprise ready in every aspect of our business – from our product development to our customer support and global operations – means staying ahead of business and IT challenges that enterprises worldwide are facing today with regard to their technology investments.
In speaking with our customers and partners worldwide, the message has never been clearer: Organizations are mandated to do more with less as well as empower employees and partners to work more efficiently to increase their competitive edge. Enterprise collaboration systems, social media, mobile devices, and cloud solutions can help promote innovation, encourage free thinking, and spawn creativity, but they also drastically increase content and create a new set of compliance and risk management challenges.
The trend toward big data presents an increased level of risk (Gartner estimates that enterprise data will grow 650 percent by 2015). At the same time, accidental data exposure, privacy breaches, loss of secure data and intellectual property, and exposure of personal information is on the rise, resulting in a greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting.
In terms of compliance and risk management, organizations’ biggest challenge is navigating the delicate balance among the trends of Enterprise Social, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and maintaining control of the information flowing through enterprises. So while the need is real to ensure employees are more connected and practicing transparency through enterprise social initiatives, it is vital that companies have a clear view of who, what, when, where, and how information has been accessed and distributed.
The reality is that while in a perfect world, risk and compliance officers would love to forbid the use of enterprise social platforms due to fears of information leakage – a recent IDC study found more than 60% of today’s data leaks come from within organizations – but people will find ways around restrictions to exchange and store information in order to get their jobs done. The need for efficient information exchange to gain competitive edge or just to stay relevant is more pressing than ever, and organizations and IT leadership can no longer afford to just run away from facing these challenges. In fact, Gartner predicts that “by 2016, 20 percent of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully”.
The time has come for an end-to-end solution that brings business, IT, and risk officers to the same table and speak the same language in order to proactively address the joint challenges they face today. This is why AvePoint offers a combination of our award-winning DocAve Software Platform, Governance Automation, and Compliance Guardian to help our customers stitch together a better enterprise collaboration story.
Mitigating risk is just one – albeit important – piece, though. While we bring cyber security to the forefront by proactively preventing, detecting, tracking, responding, and resolving the 60% of breaches that occur internally, we also address the need for enterprises to incorporate cloud computing into their technology investments. AvePoint comprehensively supports this story for enterprise collaboration as well, whether it’s through our support of hybrid environments , or software-as-a-service DocAve Online offering for organizations only using Office 365 – SharePoint Online, or for those who wish to utilize Windows Azure for SharePoint Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
AvePoint is well positioned to tackle tomorrow’s challenges today – helping customers govern and scale their social enterprise collaboration platforms with confidence.
