By: Sumeet Rohatgi, Sr Technical Director of Advanced R&D
Cloud computing, and business content collaboration in particular, is quite the trending topic in the press these days. Technically, most of the offerings currently on the market center around the use of cloud-based, accessible content storage, with numerous subscription plans for users to purchase these products on demand using the popular SaaS business model.
At YouSendIt, we believe we differentiate our offering by focusing on business users and the way they actually accomplish work.
In the 21st century, knowledge workers:
- Are focused on a number of projects: so content needs to be categorized and retained for all of these projects
- Interact with an increasing number of people both inside and outside the organization: so relevant information needs to be shared with interested parties like suppliers or customers
- Must interact with many people in remote locations: information needs to be shared for use in distributed geographies and at various access speeds (not only different devices, but raw network capacity also matters)
- Are expected to make just-in-time decisions: global competition has reduced the expected reaction time to changing circumstances
- Effectively share these decisions: changes in plans need to be widely distributed and processes developed to facilitate it, or risk inefficiency or failure of a specific project
- Information needs to be trusted: content is typically time sensitive and a company faces both material and brand risk if it leaks to the wrong audience
Virtuous Cycle
YouSendIt applications are built with a simple and common content collaboration pattern. We feel that this pattern or “virtuous cycle” as we like to call it, satisfies content needs for today’s knowledge workers; and makes them highly productive. At a high level, the cycle is a continuous iteration of the following four steps:
- Find: users search for relevant content. This action might take place by browsing folder hierarchies, for example.
- Save: once relevant content is found, users might want to “remember” it in a location of choice for future use. This might be done by creating short cuts or making a copy of the content.
- Use: later on users refer/view/edit saved content from time to time. This might be done from different devices, locations or networks. This might also be done for example to generate new content or information.
- Invite: users collaborate with others by sharing content. For instance, this is how a company’s quarterly results report gets built and other high-value content; contracts across supply chain vendors get signed.
YouSendIt showcases this cycle quite clearly: there are applications for sending, sharing, signing and synchronizing content. The YouSendIt product team spends a great deal of energy ensuring applications simplify these four steps. The user experience cherished by the team is providing users a feeling of: it just works!
This “virtuous cycle”, powerful as it is, only helps us get half way to the goal line. In a distributed workplace with global supply chains, centralized content repositories no longer make sense.
Today, valuable content is scattered and distributed across users’ thumb drives, desktops, laptops, silo enterprise content management repositories, email accounts, and mobile devices. At the same time, project decisions needing course correction in light of new information need to be made quickly; time cannot be lost in waiting for a department manager or IT report to collect, scrub and merge all the disparate information. Information also needs to be trusted in order to make effective decisions.
To compete globally, decisions need to be made with confidence – crisply, quickly and just in time. Businesses need to automatically obtain the latest information from any device, anyplace and at all times.
YouSendIt’s unique broker-agent architecture builds-out a hybrid content cloud for business users.
Distributed Security
YouSendIt’s data services platform categorizes every piece of content as belonging to either one of the following classes:
- Data: the content itself. Example: files, folders, file archives etc.
- Metadata: the data about the data. Example: file size, type, who created, updated etc.
These pieces of data and metadata live and grow independently of each other. It is the job of the data services platform to keep these content class categories in sync at or near real-time.
YouSendIt’s data services platform, through its broker-agent architecture allows for the seamless inter-operation with content living in 3rd party content repositories like enterprise content management systems.
This capability brings both distributed users and distributed content together in collaborative YouSendIt apps available on all major platforms like Macs, PCs, and mobile devices.
YouSendIt’s directory service connector secures organizations’ content using the same policies written into their existing Active Directory implementation.
The company also expends a lot of energy scrutinizing all collaborated content. The transport pipes for files (back and forth) are fully encrypted using HTTPS protocol. In addition, the files are fully encrypted at rest and virus scanned.
The company’s network perimeter is hardened, and there is a separate production network. Even internal employees require special permissions and privileges for accessing the production network. There are special provisions and technology assets built to guard against cyber-attacks such as DDOS. Operational processes follow standard compliance such as Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 2 Attestation, along with PCI regulations.
Architecturally, each piece of content residing inside the YouSendIt data services platform (whether data or metadata) carries with it a fundamental security unit defining user access and authorization permission level required. This security directive is dutifully followed by any and all applications existing over the data services platform – whether built by YouSendIt itself or by 3rd party developers using the YouSendIt developer APIs.
This security unit is managed and influenced in two ways: in most cases, there is an implicit trust of users’ actions – if the user decides on sharing, synchronizing, or sending content, YouSendIt applications allow the action to be completed – this is the default user trust policy. This policy works fine for the majority of our line of business customers. However, there also exists the possibility of creating sophisticated content governance and lifetime policies enabling an organization’s savvy security architects to govern the entire content collaboration process. The trust level in users’ actions can be dialed-up or down as per the risk tolerance level of particular organizations or industries.
This diagram illustrates the content creation and collaboration cycle powered using YouSendIt's distributed cloud.
Viral Loop
Classifying content as data and metadata (both logically and physically separate entities) provides lots of advantages. At first, it allows users to keep using their existing (local/ remote) file repositories. Users easily understand and adopt new YouSendIt applications in their content collaboration activities.
Over time, existing users send, sign or share files/folders with other people in their network. The underlying data services platform saves associated metadata automatically. Some examples of this are: creating file short cuts (links), automatic type tags (name, file type), who created which file when, folders shared with whom, and when a document was signed. Also, the YouSendIt product team building and offering other content services like document classification and fast file transfers.
The virtuous cycle brings the old and familiar folder concept to the fore; ready to tackle the challenges of the twenty-first century knowledge workers. Folders look, behave, and act quite differently to different users. For example, users could create and use folders as saved searches; a project manager might corral related dependent project documents in a saved folder of his choice – now he is fully aware of content changes done by different users in related projects; and he might use this information to influence decisions in his own project. Others users can make folders as part of a simple workflow, for example a CEO might share a folder with his admin team to approve and sign any documents that land in this folder. Still other users might use them as archival methods, where in documents landing in the folder get converted to non-editable format such as PDF. In each of the cases, the system generates metadata, which makes it more useful for users to query the system for meaningful information. For example, in the case of the CEO and his/her signature folder – a project manager may build a saved folder around his document and will be notified when his document gets approved.
Newer users enter the system through the Invite step of the virtuous cycle, and start their own virtuous cycle. This viral loop further enriches the system by adding both valuable content and users.
Today the success of YouSendIt’s virtuous cycle powered with distributed security architecture is clearly evident. YouSendIt has gathered an impressive number of registered users – at twenty-three and a half million, along with an astounding increase of a million new users registering every month!!
Consumerization presents corporate IT with a leadership opportunity. While fulfilling its charter to provide security and control systems, IT can now also enable end-user convenience that will improve productivity. First IT must embrace new consumer technologies and succeed at this balancing act; if not IT runs the risk of becoming a barrier to productivity and cost reduction.
Employees are asked to do more and to do it more quickly. With this mandate, many are turning to any resource they can make use of outside the corporate network. Employees flip back and forth from their home lives to their business lives and want to use the same tool set to accomplish their jobs as they do at home.
We are very proud and excited by the 
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