Five Ways to Balance Mobility, Productivity, and Security

Learn how Citrix ShareFile delivers business continuity across devices while reducing risk.

Data fuels workforce productivity. But corporate data typically resides in disparate silos spread across on-premises networks and cloud repositories.

Knowledge workers are forced to repeatedly disrupt daily workflows to gather information from this data sprawl — a time-consuming and inefficient activity that diminishes productivity. They need a single point of access to all data sources, available from any device, where they can share and manipulate the content resources required to do their jobs.

Consumerization and digital transformation have redefined the nature of work. Millennials, now the largest group in a highly dispersed workforce, rely on a combination of corporate and personal smart devices, mobile and cloud technologies, productivity and collaboration apps, and next-gen workspaces to do their jobs effectively — anytime and anywhere. These digital natives require flexible tools that enable them to instantly access and share documents on the go, facilitating and accelerating the critical business workflows that empower them to work smarter and faster.

Balancing Mobility, Productivity, and Security
The evolution of the brick-and-mortar corporate environment into an interconnected web of dynamic digital workspaces spread across countries and continents demands new ways to share information and ideas. Employees exchange files because document centric collaboration is a critical component of broader business processes designed to enable work teams to communicate on demand, add value, and maintain continuity. Document workflows drive and sustain productivity.

While facilitating the instant access that boosts productivity, organizations must remain focused on protecting sensitive data and intellectual property. In order to safeguard a company’s critical assets and comply with regulatory requirements and corporate security policies, IT must continuously monitor and control all user file-sharing activity. This mandate may conflict with the productivity priority, and security becomes more difficult to enforce when employees depend on consumer-grade public file-sharing services to mobilize data. Workers often bypass security controls to gain remote access to data and apps they need to do their jobs, but in doing so, they expose the organization to significant risks. Employee negligence, typically unintentional, is nevertheless the biggest cause of data breaches, and end users are the weakest link in the security chain.

This places corporate IT departments between a rock and a hard place. If IT blocks personal cloud file-sharing accounts without providing a sanctioned and user-friendly alternative, business productivity will suffer, but allowing the continued use of vulnerable tools is not a viable option. Savvy companies will deploy a single powerful enterprise file sync and sharing (EFSS) solution that expertly balances essential comprehensive security with the rich, seamless, consumer-like user experience today’s engaged employees expect and require to collaborate effectively and maximize productivity.

According to a recent Ponemon* survey, 72 percent of respondents agree an EFSS is important to reducing data security risks.

Secure content collaboration for the modern mobile workforce
Five Ways ShareFile Balances Mobility, Productivity, and Security

1. Secure File Sharing
Point. Click. Share. That's how simple it is for users to sync and share documents internally and externally on any device.

ShareFile provides industry-leading security, auditing capabilities, and compliance controls for safe content sharing, allowing organizations to safeguard data, documents, content, users, and devices with one solution. IT can control, authenticate, track, and report on who accesses, views, shares, edits, deletes, downloads, and uploads files based on user location, role, and device criteria. Lost, stolen, or otherwise potentially compromised mobile devices can be locked or wiped remotely, ensuring that proprietary data is not leaked beyond critical borders.

The ShareFile Plugin for Microsoft Outlook eliminates the size limitations and risk exposure associated with exchanging large files via email. Attachments are converted to links with expiration dates, simplifying and securing sharing activities inside and outside the organization. At the same time, IT maintains the visibility required to protect sensitive corporate data assets.

Features and Benefits:

• Multilayer Security: Granular controls protect encrypted data at rest (with AES), in transit (with SSL), and during access and use.
• Enterprise Key Management (EKM): Company-owned encryption keys allow organizations to safeguard data within private on-premises and cloud repositories.
• Information Rights Management (IRM): The authentication process follows the file itself, ensuring secure access to sensitive content only by intended recipients. Editing, printing, screen capture, and other activities can be restricted, even after the file is downloaded.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): ShareFile integrates with existing DLP solutions to restrict access and sharing based on the classification of content inside files, preventing external sharing of sensitive data. DLP helps organizations enforce regulated industry requirements, company governance policies, and security parameters for audit reporting and compliance.
• Security, Global Performance, and Regulatory Compliance: ShareFile ensures reliable performance everywhere and compliance with privacy laws and sensitive data residency requirements (including HIPAA, HITECH, and SOC-2) in regulated industry sectors.

2. Access to Files Regardless of Location
Manage data in public or private clouds, on premises, or in a hybrid architecture, while accessing and sharing documents with a single solution.

In most organizations, data is scattered across on-premises network file shares, cloud storage and management platforms (including SharePoint, Office 365, OneDrive for Business, Azure, Amazon Web Services [AWS], and Salesforce), and consumer file-sharing services (including Google Drive,Box, and Dropbox). Companies in all sectors, especially regulated industries like Financial Services and Healthcare, prefer or are required to store some or all corporate data on premises to enhance performance, reduce costs, and/or comply with data sovereignty restrictions.

Giving employees access to this increasingly fragmented data landscape is a challenge because every data source requires that its own website or application be used to view the files stored there. ShareFile seamlessly connects to data everywhere, regardless of where it resides, delivering secure one-click access for mobile users. In addition, ShareFile is one of the few EFSS offerings that gives organizations the choice of where to store files, allowing selection of the option that best meets the company’s needs.

Features and Benefits:

• ShareFile StorageZones: Choose where to store data. Manage it in on-premises datacenters, let Citrix manage it in the cloud with Azure or AWS, or adopt a hybrid approach.
• Restricted StorageZones: Rely on private data areas to customize file-sharing activity, restricting access to specific authenticated internal users.
• StorageZone Connectors: Connect to network shares, Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and more, extending connectivity to all your digital sharing and collaboration tools.
• Agility and Cost Savings: Continue to store and mobilize data in existing locations — no need to migrate content. Depend on a single solution to increase the speed and decrease the cost of connecting to data everywhere.

ShareFile consistently leads the way as the only enterprise-class file sync and share solution that can run on any cloud, on-premises, and hybrid IT infrastructure.

3. Document Workflows & Collaboration
Stop email chains and save storage by reducing the number of attachments. Gather feedback, approvals, and electronic signatures with a single solution.

Take the complication out of collaboration. Avoid confusing email trails, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines. ShareFile goes beyond mobilizing data to facilitate critical workflows operating inside and outside the organization. While many EFSS solutions offer table-stakes capabilities like internal document sharing, ShareFile supports and secures external content collaboration scenarios with customers, partners, suppliers, outsourced service providers, and others.

ShareFile’s simple, customized, intuitive user interface integrates document workflows and empowers teams to get more done faster. Built-in co-authoring, feedback, and approval processes give colleagues a convenient hub to collectively create, review, modify, annotate, and track document changes in real time.

Features and Benefits:

• Document Management: ShareFile ensures safe exchange of internal and external-facing documents including contracts, proposals, training tools, on boarding paperwork, performance reviews, marketing collateral, sales presentations, and product information.
• Automated Notifications: Project team members receive reminders for review and approval requests.
• Version Control: Collaborators can track document changes across multiple data sources and devices.
• Workflow Automation: Document-based business processes are continuously improved in constantly evolving environments.
• Electronic Signature: Users can automatically send documents for feedback, approval, and electronic signature directly from ShareFile.

4. Maximizing Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Cloud
Use ShareFile to view, edit and collaborate on files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for business. You can also use the Outlook Plugin for secure, direct email access.

Better Together:
ShareFile + Office 365 = Instant Access and Secure Collaboration

Microsoft is a leader in productivity and collaboration, as evidenced by the growing adoption of Office 365. ShareFile extends the value of Office 365, offering a more comprehensive solution for end-to-end mobility, maximum productivity, and robust security. Citrix designed ShareFile to complement and integrate with Microsoft technologies.

Features and Benefits:

• Single Point of Access: Use ShareFile to access files in Office 365, Azure, SharePoint, and network shares from a single app. Get simple, secure sharing anytime, anywhere, on any device, inside and outside organizational boundaries.
• Enhanced Workflows: Preview, edit, and co-author Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents online and in one place. Easily collaborate from any browser, computer, or mobile device.
• Secure External Collaboration: Count on comprehensive authentication and authorization of external users, plus easy file sharing with recipients who are not part of your organization’s Active Directory service.
• Virtualization: Use OneDrive for Business in virtual environments.
• Compliance: Know what was shared, with whom, when, and from where with extensive audit trail and reporting capabilities.

Organizations often combine Microsoft OneDrive for Business for internal user productivity and a hybrid EFSS product like ShareFile for external collaboration

5. Virtualization & Mobility
Use ShareFile with Citrix XenDesktop, XenApp, and XenMobile to enable secure mobile content collaboration.

ShareFile is the only enterprise file sync and share solution optimized for virtual environments.

As the leader in next-gen workstyles, Citrix provides comprehensive solutions to enable secure mobility with a simple, convenient, high-performance user experience on any device or network. ShareFile tightly integrates with Citrix technologies for desktop virtualization, mobile application management (MAM), mobile device management (MDM), and enterprise mobility management (EMM).

Most file sync and share solutions are not designed for the unique storage and performance requirements of virtualized environments. ShareFile is developed with hosted desktops in mind, so you can use the same file sync and share solution across physical and virtual endpoints, and across on-premises and cloud storage locations.

Organizations can use XenMobile with ShareFile to extend security via device and application management, retain a single identity between ShareFile and XenMobile, and save to ShareFile from the XenMobile Secure Mail, Secure Notes, and Secure Forms apps. ShareFile and XenMobile are essential elements of a comprehensive business mobility strategy.

Features and Benefits:

• Performance: Use Drive Mapper to present a virtual drive to users, reducing storage needs for synchronization and increasing network performance.
• Configuration: Define cache size, drive letter, and other options to keep virtual desktops efficient.
• Mobile Device Management: Use XenMobile to provide additional MDM options, such as disallowing clipboard cut/copy, blocking the camera or microphone, disabling printing, or constraining Wi-Fi networks.
• Secure Productivity: ShareFile fully integrates with XenMobile Secure Mail, Secure Notes, and Secure Forms, and includes XenMobile MDX-wrapped clients for Android and iOS.
• Unified Solution: The Citrix portfolio of advanced technology solutions delivers a consistent user experience and seamless transition between physical, virtual, and mobile workspaces, across on-premises and cloud data repositories.

Work happens from many locations and devices

• 77% of global information workers now work outside of the office
• Only 23% of workers are onsite

Forrester 2016 Global Business Technographics Telecommunications and Mobility Workforce Survey

ShareFile: Built for Business and Trusted by IT

As a leader in virtualization and mobility, Citrix protects the world’s most sensitive information, simplifying and verifying the security and sharing of data in corporate apps and documents across locations, networks, and devices. Organizations can ensure the appropriate level of access for every individual and situation with visibility and control to address privacy, compliance, and risk management priorities without compromising end-user productivity.

More than 20 million business users and 80,000 customers rely on the robust collaboration capabilities delivered by ShareFile. Meet the mobility and collaboration needs of business users and the data security requirements of the business without interrupting critical daily workflows. Empower employees to work smarter, and help your business achieve agility and flexibility to capitalize on emerging opportunities and stay ahead of the competition. Mobilize data, streamline workflows, and enhance security with ShareFile.