Kris Lahiri Chief Security Officer, Egnyte

At RSA Conference, Egnyte, Inc. introduced co-founder Kris Lahiri as the company’s new chief security officer and unveiled his FY14 security roadmap, which details the company’s plans to raise the global standard for secure file sharing in the enterprise by adding key security enhancements and integrations for secure deployment options, data privacy and industry standards.

Egnyte’s solution, secure and scalable, has also been awarded the Skyhigh CloudTrust rating of Enterprise-Ready, which is given to the select cloud services that satisfy the most stringent requirements for data protection, identity verification, service security, business practices and legal protection.

 A co-founder of Egnyte, Lahiri has a background working with and meeting the needs of enterprise customers. As CSO, he will drive security advances across Egnyte’s infrastructure and will manage cross-functional teams that will implement security enhancements and integrations that businesses require.

“Egnyte is the only file-sharing solution built from the ground up to meet the needs of the enterprise,” said Lahiri. “As the market evolves, so do the needs of our customers, and nothing is more vital to a business than the security of its most valuable asset – its business data. With alarming revelations of the NSA program and mass data breaches across a variety of industries, we understand how crucial it is to share our roadmap with our customers so they understand how Egnyte plans to secure their data and meet all of their security needs now and into the future.”

Deployment
According to a recent survey from Enterprise Strategy Group, 97% of cloud adopters prefer a hybrid solution. Egnyte enables cloud-only and hybrid deployment models that enable businesses to access and store 100% of their files in the way best suited to meet their needs.

Late in 2013, Egnyte launched Storage Connect, a solution that allows enterprises to obtain cloud benefits, while retaining file storage purely on-premises.

In 2014, Egnyte expects to enhance Storage Connect along multiple dimensions:

• Granular Auditing & DLP Integration: It will tie in with existing DLP solutions installed on-premises, allowing customers in regulated industries to honor complex policies (e.g. regular expressions, fingerprints, machine learning) on certain data, such as credit card details, social security numbers, or health information, and all files will be scanned to ensure those details aren’t shared outside of the company. IT will also be able to audit file activity across both cloud and on-premise files in an integrated fashion.
• Unified Identity Management: In conjunction with RSA, the company expands its partnership with OneLogin to simplify identity management under a unified framework, regardless of which deployment model a customer chooses – cloud, on-premises or hybrid.

“We’re excited to continue partnering with Egnyte to provide an integration that adds additional security measures for our customers at all data touchpoints, from logging in to access their business-critical data to sharing and storing it,” said Josh Greene, VP of business development, OneLogin, Inc. “Partnering with Egnyte has provided our customers with a secure enterprise option for sharing business files, and we’re excited to continue developing additional security measures through our integration.”

Data
Egnyte is also adding new security features and integrations at every touchpoint along the data life-cycle to further expand data security; these features include:

• Endpoint Encryption: This capability will provide customers with extra security if an end-user device is lost or stolen, or if an employee leaves the company. The encrypted files that are downloaded on these devices will only be accessible with a key, and that key can be revoked remotely by IT.
• Antivirus protection: To protect against malware infecting customer data in the cloud, antivirus capability, powered by Sophos, will scan files before they’re stored to ensure the data is malware free.

Industry
For the next 12 months, Egnyte is focused on enhancing compliance standards for several industries, with an emphasis on:

• SOC2: It will complete a certification for its internal processes, with a priority on enhanced auditing and controls when developing and building out the Egnyte platform.
• Digital Rights Management (DRM): Enhanced DRM will provide increased file controls for sensitive materials, such as intellectual property or legal forms. IT teams in regulated industries will be able to create a policy on what users can do with different file types.

Lahiri is a co-founder of Egnyte and was VP of operations before moving into his new role. Prior to Egnyte, he spent many years in the design and deployment of large scale infrastructure for Fortune 100 customers of Valdero and KPMG Consulting.

Kris has a B.Tech in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras, and an MS from the University of Cincinnati.