As mobile devices & remote working practices become more prevalent in today's organizations, an increasing number of workers are using consumer file sharing tools to ensure they have access to the latest version of documents. However enterprise requirements are very different to individual preferences when establishing which tools to use.

1. Huddle Sync: Intelligent
file synchronization for the
enterprise

2. Huddle Sync: Intelligent file
synchronization for the enterprise
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 The corporate content ecosystem
1 Cloud-enabled file sync across all devices
1 Enterprise challenges with consumer file sync tools
2 Full transparency and audit trails
2 Centralized control
2 Digital islands and information silos
2 Large data volumes
3 Huddle Sync: The first enterprise file sync platform
3 True enterprise-grade security and availability
3 Easily manage access and permissions
4 Predictive analysis eliminates information silos and search
4 Huddle Sync isn’t evolutionary - it’s revolutionary
4 About Huddle
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3. THE CORPORATE CONTENT ECOSYSTEM
Until several years ago, most or all corporate files resided locally within a company’s
data center or on local desktop hard drives, which limited worker mobility. However,
over the past decade there has been a shift from storing and managing local files
and applications to leveraging the efficiencies of “the cloud”— a term that broadly
represents file and application access over the web. This has ushered in radically
different ways to communicate and interact with content wherever, whenever and
however workers desire.
Driven by consumer demand, highly mobile, cloud-enabled endpoint devices such
as tablets and smartphones are entering business IT environments. These enable
workers to conduct a wide range of personal and business activities while on the go.
This shift is forcing IT departments to rethink traditional data infrastructure strategies to
accommodate mobile devices. Consider the growing market for mobile devices:
■■ The smartphone market is currently larger than the PC market
■■ The global number of smartphone users is predicted to exceed two billion by 2015
■■ More Apple iPads were sold in Q4 2011 than sales of any manufacturer’s entire PC line
■■ 78% of enterprises plan to have tablets deployed by the end of 2013
As workers continue to embrace mobile devices, more business data will be accessed
outside of the office, across a wide range of devices. Businesses that maintain a
traditional data infrastructure without a cloud or mobile strategy may face non-trivial
challenges compared to competitors who are moving towards more highly scalable,
ultra-secure and multi-tenanted cloud services.
CLOUD-ENABLED FILE SYNC ACROSS ALL DEVICES
Recently, the cloud has expanded from consumer, web-based Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) - such as Flickr or Vimeo - and cheap, scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) - like Amazon Web Services or Rackspace - to encompass the entire IT data
environment. As the central data repository, the cloud can power file and application
access across all devices, keeping them all in sync.
Sync tools are not new to consumers. For Apple users, iCloud has enabled seamless,
automatic synchronization of photos, music and contacts across all supported devices.
For example, if you take a photo on your iPhone, the photo will be almost instantly
available on your iPad. The concept is simple: no matter where you are or what device
you’re using, you have access to your content.
File synchronization combines the familiar user experience and offline capabilities of
keeping applications and data local, with the centralized, access anywhere, cross-
platform benefits of SaaS web apps. Due to their simplicity and convenience, it is no
surprise that consumer file sharing tools are very popular for syncing personal files
between devices.
However, workers are increasingly using consumer file sharing and content
management tools in conjunction with personal devices for storing and sharing business REFERENCES
files. This raises a number of issues, including security, permissions and compliance. [1] Parks Associates. Smartphone: King of
Convergence (Second Edition). Dallas: Parks
Associates
ENTERPRISE CHALLENGES WITH CONSUMER FILE SYNC TOOLS [2] Menn, J. (2011, February 8). Smartphone
shipments surpass PCs. Financial Times
Enterprise requirements are very different to individual preferences when establishing
which tools to use for file sharing, content management and collaboration. What works [3] Apple, Inc.
for consumers at a personal level is unlikely to work for an enterprise with thousands [4] Dimensional Research. Enterprise iPad
of employees, important permissions and access protocols, and complex security and and Tablet Adoption. Sunnyvale: Dimensional
Research
compliance requirements.
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4. A successful enterprise content management strategy focuses on sharing information
and collaborating on content with large groups of people, while maintaining the security
and control over corporate data.
FULL TRANSPARENCY AND AUDIT TRAILS
IT security officers at large corporations demand a much higher standard of security
and visibility than consumer tools offer. In a collaborative environment, full audit trails
are a useful tool for tracking which user made specific changes to files. For larger
enterprises and government organizations, audits become an essential security control
and are often required for legislative compliance. Consumer file sharing tools lack audit
trail visibility because they are typically not needed for only one or a few users.
Workers joining, leaving and changing roles is fairly infrequent in small businesses
and the changes can usually be handled on an individual basis with consumer or SMB
tools. However, as a business grows, it becomes harder to efficiently manage this type
of change. At enterprise scale, hundreds of workers are moving in, out and around
the organization regularly. This requires seamless IT operations, which may include
integration with management systems and automation for document access and
workflow management.
CENTRALIZED CONTROL
With consumer file sharing tools, an administrator can explicitly list people with whom
they would like to share a document. At enterprise scale, this approach becomes
unmanageable.
To maximize the value of intellectual capital within a large organization, file sharing and
collaboration must happen in relation to teams and roles, rather than named individuals.
Large quantities of files will need to be shared with groups via dedicated workspaces.
For example, the sales team or a team focused on a particular project.
At enterprise scale, administrators need to have the ability to limit access to content by
individual, role or team. By doing so, workers will only have access to the content that
is appropriate to them and can interact with it in a way that aligns with their duties. This
approach also helps to ensure that content remains secure. Consumer tools are not
designed to facilitate cross-enterprise sharing or offer fine-grained controls over what
actions each group of users can perform on an item.
DIGITAL ISLANDS AND INFORMATION SILOS
A frequent irritation for custodians of corporate data is when business data —typically
owned by one team or department — exists in its own silo. No one outside of the team
(including IT) has access to it.
As a result, content discovery is virtually impossible and effort may be duplicated
across the business as workers recreate documents that already exist. Information
situated in silos also presents a serious security and compliance challenge for IT as it
can’t manage and secure the flow of data in and out of the company. Although relevant
and useful content exists across the enterprise, consumer sync tools fail to provide any
means of accessing or managing it securely.
LARGE DATA VOLUMES
Consumer file sync tools allow users to synchronize a few gigabytes of files between
desktops and laptops. Users can then typically select a subset of those files to be
available on mobile devices. For small teams, several gigabytes might be manageable,
even if the users have to manually select the files to synchronize.
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5. However, the enterprise data store can be many terabytes. This is particularly true
if the organization has succeeded in gathering useful content (representing valuable
intellectual property) from people’s local hard drives and email inboxes and made
the data available in a central store. Synchronizing the entire corporate data store to
everyone’s desktop isn’t typically possible due to the size and quantity of data—only
a portion of which might be relevant to the individual. It’s even more problematic for
mobile devices due to storage limits and data costs.
Consumer sync tools are great for providing access to documents at an individual level,
but they lack the security, scalability and intelligence required for the enterprise. These
tools represent a costly data loss time bomb waiting to happen. Savvy enterprises
can look at next-gen file sync tools built from the ground up for large businesses and
government organizations with many users and large data sets.
HUDDLE SYNC: THE FIRST ENTERPRISE FILE SYNC PLATFORM
Now in private beta and to become standard as part of Huddle software, Huddle Sync
makes true cross-enterprise file synchronization possible for the first time. It’s the first
intelligent enterprise file sync platform that has a recommendation engine to predict the
files that workers will require from across the entire data store. Huddle Sync’s patent-
pending push technology then automatically and securely delivers the latest versions to
workers’ desktops and mobile devices.
As workers always have the latest version of important documents on their Huddle-
enabled devices they can view files and collaborate in real-time, enabling them to work
anywhere, anytime, even offline. For CIOs and IT, data is no longer allowed to flow freely
across the firewall onto consumer devices without oversight. True enterprise sync is now
a reality, and for the first time the needs of both workers and IT are met.
TRUE ENTERPRISE-GRADE SECURITY AND AVAILABILITY
Huddle has been built to meet strict security and availability requirements and is trusted
by central governments and Fortune 500 corporations to store sensitive, classified
information. All transmissions to and from Huddle, including sign-on, are encrypted at
256-bit through SSL via HTTPS. Content is also stored as encrypted data in maximum-
security data centers.
Huddle offers CIOs and IT administrators a 360° view of data with complete audit trails
and full transparency into where data is stored, who has interacted with or synced data
and when. For added security, in the event that a device is lost, stolen, or if an individual
leaves the company, Huddle Sync enables IT to remote wipe Huddle data from endpoint
devices.
EASILY MANAGE ACCESS AND PERMISSIONS
The workspace model is a core part of what makes Huddle work at enterprise scale.
It allows large groups of people, departments or businesses to collaborate easily and
securely on content. Huddle’s permission groups and granular, folder-level controls give
greater flexibility in both permission settings and ongoing permissions management.
Users can be easily and automatically added and removed from groups and
workspaces, eliminating the need for manual user management. Huddle also integrates
with Active Directory for effortless user authentication.
Additionally, as Huddle Sync unlocks the corporate knowledge base according to
existing access and permissions, workers have visibility of all enterprise content they are
permitted to view — in real-time and on any device. Only files of immediate interest are
fully synced.
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6. PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS ELIMINATES INFORMATION SILOS AND SEARCH
Huddle Sync is powered by patent-pending predictive algorithms. These are linked
to workers’ actions in Huddle and are the result of years spent analyzing data usage
patterns in the system. As a result, Huddle Sync intelligently selects files that will be
of most relevance to users for full synchronization. Selected files are downloaded in
the background and mobile users can choose to enable sync over WiFi and cellular
connection or WiFi only. Once content is synced, it’s available across all devices,
whether online or offline.
Research shows that workers only require offline access to a tiny proportion of the
entire corporate data store, so Huddle Sync efficiently utilizes the limited storage
available on mobile devices. It syncs and downloads only the most relevant files,
instead of trying to sync everything. Unsynced files are shown as placeholders, giving
mobile users complete visibility of all the files available to them without consuming
bandwidth or using local device storage.
As Huddle Sync’s recommendations algorithms extend throughout the corporate
data store, Huddle is able to do something previously impossible in the enterprise. It
empowers businesses to recover valuable files and liberates users from unknowingly
duplicating work by automatically discovering and delivering useful content they might
not have known about. By ensuring that everyone always has the most up-to-date
files and intelligently managing version conflicts, Huddle Sync reclaims time wasted
reconciling file changes.
If Huddle users should ever need to find something that hasn’t been synced, Huddle
offers full-text search across all workspaces, together with full API support to allow
integration with other enterprise search products.
HUDDLE SYNC ISN’T EVOLUTIONARY—IT’S REVOLUTIONARY
Huddle is the first cloud tool to offer enterprise-grade collaboration and content
management features with user-friendly — and seemingly magical — file
synchronization. Huddle Sync’s set of learning algorithms are linked to all user
actions in Huddle, enabling it to intelligently select the files of most relevance for full
sync across all Huddle-enabled devices. Whether it’s files created by colleagues
you frequently work with, documents needing your approval or content you recently
commented on, Huddle Sync ensures you have access on any device, at any time.
ABOUT HUDDLE
Established in November 2006 and based in London and San Francisco, Huddle is the
leader in Enterprise Collaboration and Content Management in the cloud.
With Huddle you can manage projects, share files and collaborate with people inside
and outside of your company, securely. It is available online, on mobile devices, on
the desktop, via Microsoft Office applications, major business social networks and in
multiple languages. Simply: if SharePoint was built today, they would’ve built Huddle.
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