Collaborate with Confidence & Leapfrog the Adoption Curve

AvePoint recently sponsored an IDC survey with Microsoft in Asia that found 80 percent of businesses in that region want to adopt enterprise social platforms including Microsoft SharePoint in the next 18 months, but are reticent to do so because of data leakage, security, and compliance concerns. This tells us that more than ever, despite the macro-economic slowdown, businesses recognize the fervent need to improve their innovation velocity and competitiveness in today’s hyper-connected information world. This means ensuring information is available to those who should have it and protected from those who should not is of paramount importance. This brings up a seemingly simple question, then: How can we help enterprises leap frog the adoption curve and truly bring enterprise collaboration and social into the confines of the enterprise? It’s a simple question but requires a nuanced answer. While this is already a given in the consumer space, enterprises are different from consumers in that they have much more liability when it comes to intellectual property (IP), public relations, and other legal concerns with regard to the exchange and flow of information. The differentiator now, as opposed to even just a few years ago, is that merely terming this collaboration initiative as a pipe dream is no longer sufficient. It’s no longer sufficient for knowledge workers, and it’s certainly not accepted by enterprises’ customers and clients. Let’s be honest with ourselves – business users will always find ways to get their jobs done, regardless of what legal and compliance stakeholders desire. A real-world example includes compliance officers rejecting an ask to share data externally through SharePoint. Instead of taking no for an answer, workers decided to use the “free” Google Apps platform to share information – thus opening up the organization to a tremendous liability risk to its corporate IP. This reality that keeps many compliance officers awake at night opens the door for AvePoint to provide the elixir through our traditional strength in infrastructure management and governance as well as our expanded integration story of compliance and risk management for enterprise collaboration platforms. We can provide that peace of mind risk averse yet growth seeking organizations desire today, the ability to truly embrace enterprise collaboration and social initiatives. From my travels worldwide speaking with CEOs, CIOs, compliance, and risk officers, I clearly see the need to consolidate platforms, improve information worker efficiency, and empower stakeholders to have access to the right information anywhere and anytime. With that said, the enterprise must have visibility and control over who, what, and where that information is being shared – both inside the walls of an organization and outside to its customers and partners. This tension is where AvePoint has its greatest strength – we can help customers refine their enterprise collaboration and social vision by utilizing all their various investments today (be it SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Box, Dropbox, Jive, and others) and stitch together a cohesive information collaboration story that offers strong security, compliance visibility, and enforcement capabilities that risk and compliance officers need. Our unique capability in cross-platform compliance and governance, in addition to our background in infrastructure management across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, help customers worldwide leap frog the SharePoint adoption curve and focus on improving worker efficiency. In the coming months, we will continue to share real-world success stories on how AvePoint’s focus on collaboration with confidence helps enterprises smash barriers to productivity and unlock the next wave of innovation from their most important asset – their employees.