Enterprise Insights: How Businesses are Getting Work Done

Everyone has heard the saying “knowledge is power.” When it comes to knowledge, Egnyte knows content. With over 10 years of experience managing content and creating collaboration solutions, we have collected petabytes of data around our customers’ content – the types of files they work with, where they store their files, how they interact with them, and much more. What’s truly unique to Egnyte, and what makes us more powerful than our competition, is that we are the ONLY company that is able to collect data around ALL of our customers’ content, whether it lives in the cloud and on-premises.Our team of data scientists took on a project recently to take a look at last years’ data to find information that businesses could use to help strengthen their IT strategy, empower employees, and improve the way they are getting work done.Know Your ContentFirst, our team collected a sample set of 25 petabytes of data to gain knowledge around what kind of content businesses are working with and how they are managing it. Here’s what they found:

What stood out immediately is that our customer content grew 61% YoY, with hybrid content (meaning files that are stored in the cloud AND on-premises) growing by 83%. Couple that with the fact that businesses have 41% of their content residing on-premises and it makes for a very intriguing question – why is there still such a heavy reliance in on-premises infrastructure?Because of the popularity of the cloud and all of the benefits it brings, on-premises infrastructure has often gotten a bad wrap as being “legacy” or “outdated”. While true in one sense, it is not necessarily a negative case. Many of our customers, like Balfour Beatty Construction who leverages large blueprint files and Red Bull who often collaborates on large video files, rely heavily on the dependability and reliability of on-premises hardware for performance.Looking back at our team’s research, we found something very interesting about volume vs. storage, which may shock a lot of businesses. We found that video files only took up 1% of the content in terms of quantity (number of files), yet they accounted for 20% of the storage volume. So let’s say only 100 of a company’s 10,000 files are video. This may look like a small footprint, but in reality it is using up 20% of their storage capacity.This trend won’t slow down either as HubSpot is projecting video to claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019. That means we will see a lot more video content hitting our platform in the years to come.While the cloud is a fantastic solution for creating universal access to content and supporting a mobile workforce, the numbers show it will not be enough as a standalone solution in the future – a future that will heavily involve larger files.Know Your Employees As important as it is to have knowledge around what type of content your business is working on and how you manage it, it is equally important to understand how your employees are working on it.In the second part of our analysis, our team of data scientists examined a sample size of over 4 billion activities to gain more knowledge about the behavior of our customers’ employees (users) when they are working on content, i.e. what kind of devices they are using, what operating systems they prefer, etc. Here’s what they found:

Immediately we were drawn to the fact that Google Chrome had such a commanding lead over fellow browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google has time and time again been labeled a consumer brand, thus, not one we thought would be so widely accepted for use in the workplace. That is on top of the fact that Google Chrome has been repeatedly ripped apart on message boards for taking up too much RAM.The more interesting finding is negative correlation between desktop and mobile activities. Looking at the numbers, only 25% of desktop activities were done on MacOS while 82% of mobile activities were done on iOS. In contrast, 75% of desktop activities were done via Windows with 18% of mobile activities being done via Android.These numbers prove how important it is for businesses to implement agnostic solutions that are seamlessly compatible across any devices and any operating system. This shows that 3 out of every 4 activities are being done on a Windows version of the desktop application, while a little more than 3 out of 4 activities are done using an iOS version of the desktop application. If you deploy a solution that is robust on Windows but heavily lacking on the iOS side, your business will significantly struggle.As predicted by MarketsandMarkets, 50% of businesses will have adopted a BYOD strategy by the end of this year, which will only put more emphasis on the importance of these findings.Learn From The BestEgnyte has spent over 10 years managing content and creating collaboration solutions for businesses. Thanks to our hybrid architecture we are uniquely positioned to analyze all of the content within an organization and provide a truly holistic assessment of how business is being done. Our analysis provides us with invaluable knowledge that we pass down to our customers directly, and via our product.As we know, knowledge is power, and we believe our unique knowledge helps us make both our Admins and End Users more powerful than they’ve ever been before.