© 2017 by Egnyte Inc. All rights reserved

Case Study

In the Business of Making Headlines

You’d practically have to be living under a rock if you’ve not yet encountered BuzzFeed. They are a globally distributed digital media powerhouse that is currently read and watched by over 500 million people across more than 30 platforms worldwide, touting 7 billion content views per month. Just let that sink in. If you still don’t think you know who they are, chances are a friend has sent you a link to an exploding watermelon, a Tasty recipe or hard–pressing article about foreign workers in the United States.

Add to those impressive statistics that the company did not barely exist a decade ago and you can see what remarkable growth and innovation BuzzFeed has created, employing more than 1,300 staff with offices in 18 cities across the globe, including its 52,000-square-foot production studio in LA.

LocationFounded in New York City with 18 offices worldwide

IndustryMedia

Company OverviewBuzzFeed is a globally distributed media powerhouse, read and watched by over 500 million people worldwide. With a global news organization based in New York and an entertainment studio in Los Angeles, BuzzFeed produces news and entertainment to a highly engaged audience across more than 30 platforms across the globe.

Solution• Egnyte Connect—Cloud

deployment, Mobile app, Desktop Sync, Storage Sync

• Egnyte Connect for Salesforce integration

• Egnyte Connect for Outlook integration

BuzzFeed Chooses Egnyte Connect for Smart Content Collaboration

© 2017 by Egnyte Inc. All rights reserved BuzzFeed | 2

Case Study

BuzzFeed is in the business of creating content and fosters a unique culture, admittedly obsessed with innovation and focused on building a media platform for today and into the future. The company aims to connect deeply with its audience, creating content that will be worth sharing with people. As a venture-backed tech company BuzzFeed promotes a flexible and nimble environment, encouraging employees to try new formats in a culture of experimentation.

Keeping Up with Growth

We spoke with Jason Reich, Director of Global Security and Justine Bienkowski, Senior IT Manager at BuzzFeed to learn more about their challenges and how IT has adapted to rapid growth. Justine joined BuzzFeed a few years ago when there were only 250 employees and had begun looking at how to solve the challenges around collaboration and security. Jason was the first hire to focus solely on security at BuzzFeed, which at this particular juncture in the company’s acceleration is crucial.

In the last two years, the company has doubled in size, both in employees and by output, creating the majority of its content in-house, as well as posting double digit quarterly revenue growth. BuzzFeed operates as a cloud-based company, using collaboration tools with Google office suite, often sharing documents among reporters, editors, field offices and business and sales teams. The IT team needed to account for many different internal stakeholders, including legal, IT and finance teams, as well as reporters and staff in the field. It was a delicate balance to accelerate the speed of information for the needs of the business side, as well as provide the security the company needs.

The creative teams at BuzzFeed were experiencing very laggard upload times for large Photoshop files to Dropbox which was slowing down productivity. At the time, Jason and his team found many employees were sharing files over email, but also using both corporate and personal Dropbox accounts. The content created was widely distributed but from there control was lost, with a single file possibly existing in dozens of different personal and corporate accounts, sometimes even outside of the organization.

Challenges• Eliminate shadow IT and deploy a

secure enterprise file sharing solution• Meet requirements of various internal

stakeholders, including reporting, for business teams and uninterrupted workflows for reporters

• Integrate content collaboration with applications like Salesforce

Benefits • Granular control and reporting to

better understand and monitor how content is shared

• Efficiency and standardization with an intuitive and scalable content workflow

• Seamless integration with Salesforce to equip sales teams to easily find and organize files

© 2017 by Egnyte Inc. All rights reserved BuzzFeed | 3

Case Study

“With Egnyte Connect, BuzzFeed was able to meet the requirements for a secure collaboration solution, without disrupting content creation and workflow, which was imperative to a digital media powerhouse where our content creators are fueling our immense growth.”

Jason ReichDirector of Global SecurityBuzzFeed

With an improvisational culture and a fast-paced environment, many employees and teams were gravitating to obvious consumer-based content collaboration tools, unaware of existing enterprise accounts, and more importantly the risks involved in shadow IT. The majority of BuzzFeed employees are digital native, and employees often adopted ad hoc solutions using technology that worked for each individual or team.

However, at this point in the company’s growth security was a key element and lack of central management and visibility had the potential to impact business operations. It was imperative to arrive at a content collaboration solution with minimal disruption of workflows. “Being in the business of news and entertainment can earn you some powerful enemies,” explains Reich. “It was our job to ensure the safety of our people, and our content, with a secure file sharing and management solution that could be implemented across the entire BuzzFeed organization.”

The Solution

The first order of business was to do a bit of education and evangelism about the need for a secure file sharing system. While some companies focus solely on the inevitable hacking, Jason and his team wanted to look at best practices to educate BuzzFeed around the importance of privacy and security in their digital workplace. Demonstrating the benefits around security and privacy fundamentals within BuzzFeed was also key, as it encouraged them to engage in best practices in all aspects of their work, rather than just with sensitive material.

“Shadow IT simply means I am not doing my job properly,” states Bienkowski. “If someone at BuzzFeed needs to go out and find a solution to a problem on their own, then that means I am not already meeting that need. We also needed to identify the best possible solution for our users. We could provide the most secure solution in the world, but if it wasn’t seamless and unhindered and our reporters weren’t going to use it then it wasn’t worth implementing.”

© 2017 by Egnyte Inc. All rights reserved BuzzFeed | 4

Case Study

After identifying the move away from Dropbox, BuzzFeed took a look at solutions from Syncplicity and ownCloud as well as a handful of hybrid solutions, but none had the security features BuzzFeed required. Egnyte Connect was the ideal solution. BuzzFeed initially onboarded 1,000 users, with plans to expand with the natural growth of the company, not only in number of users but in leveraging the more collaborative features of Egnyte Connect.

BuzzFeed deployed Egnyte Connect with these benefits and features:

Collaboration Without Limits: BuzzFeed employees are able to collaborate with the productivity apps and tools they have grown accustomed to, without IT needing to micromanage the way they work. With Egnyte Connect employees can stay productive while IT ensures the security of company content behind the scenes.

Advanced Visibility and Control: Egnyte Connect provides IT at BuzzFeed complete visibility and granular control over all of their company content. Operations have also simplified, as file hierarchies are now in place for new hires, creating a centralized folder for the documents they will need at the start of employment. This solution is scalable and also allows administrators to lock down folders within folders to individuals as necessary.

Salesforce Application Integration: Salesforce integration was key for BuzzFeed since it is a key platform for the business team. Salesforce for Egnyte allows all client folders to be automatically managed by Egnyte Connect, enabling users to access files and create content through the Salesforce interface. After the deployment, employees have raved that Egnyte Connect is even easier to use with Salesforce.

The RewardsAfter choosing Egnyte Connect, BuzzFeed moved quickly to implement the solution, moving 3Tb of data with over three short weeks without disrupting any internal collaboration workflows and retaining original content permissions. Following the Egnyte Connect cloud deployment, BuzzFeed has created many efficiencies across the company.

The problems the creative team were experiencing have been resolved and uploading large files is efficient and fast. Employees across multiple teams can easily collaborate and share information, often working on files from multiple locations and departments. Egnyte Connect Smart Reporting and Auditing allows the IT team to better understand how content is shared. The IT team can set granular permissions on the file structure, which is essential for security purposes.

“Our business team is in love with Egnyte for Salesforce integration. They’re now able to find every single document and it has revolutionized the way Egnyte Connect is used across the team, which is very satisfying since that was our goal from the beginning. Egnyte is successful at BuzzFeed because the file structure makes sense to our users, while still providing our team with valuable end–to–end protection.”

Justine BienkowskiSenior IT ManagerBuzzFeed

www.egnyte.com | +1-650-968-4018 | 1350 W. Middlefield Rd, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA

Egnyte transforms business through smarter content allowing organizations to connect, protect,and unlock value from all their content. Our Content Intelligence platform delivers smart content collaboration and governance in the cloud or on-premises to thousands of businesses around the world even the most regulated industries. Founded in 2007, Egnyte is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Investors include venture capital firms, such as Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as well as technology partners, such as CenturyLink and Seagate Technology.

Case Study

As a cloud-based solution, Egnyte Connect ensures content is available to the users regardless of location. Having Egnyte Connect means that BuzzFeed does not need to hire three administrators to manage an onsite content storage infrastructure, providing cost savings as well as eliminating the worry of a server going down. Shadow IT has been eliminated and BuzzFeed employees now understand the importance of digital literacy and protecting all online assets. Employees are no longer purchasing their own solutions because an intuitive enterprise solution is in place with Egnyte Connect, allowing a sharing workflow that makes sense to users. Adding users is simple, and can be done with a click of a button or a call to the administrator.

BuzzFeed knows that employees will default to the most efficient way to do their job. Egnyte Connect has allowed BuzzFeed to collaborate on content in a way that makes sense for their workflows, and also happens to be the most secure and sophisticated solution, protecting staff and reporters and making IT and legal happy on the back end. Now, that’s good news.

Smart Content Collaboration & Governance

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