Oktane20: Powering Secure Collaboration Across Distributed Workforces

Sarah Urbonas: Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining our session today. My name is Sarah Urbonas. I'm a product marketing manager at Dropbox covering ecosystem partnerships. There's a lot going on in the world right now that stretches far beyond work, so we're especially grateful for your time with us today. Our goal is that by the end of the session, you understand how Dropbox business can help power collaboration and work with your existing investments, like Okta, to meet the new demands of distributed work today.

Sarah Urbonas: We want to acknowledge these are uncertain times, and we're thinking of everyone affected by COVID-19. The Dropbox team is working hard to try to help those impacted through a variety of ways, including offering free Dropbox business and HelloSign enterprise for a three-month period to nonprofits and NGOs focused on fighting COVID-19. We urge your team to apply if you meet this criteria. We're also allowing Octane attendees joining the session and stopping by our booth to donate $10 to a charity of their choice on behalf of Dropbox to help those supporting COVID-19 relief efforts. We'll be sharing links to both of these in our resources in the chat section, so keep an eye out. So on that note, let's dive in.

Sarah Urbonas: To give you a preview of how we'll be spending our time together, we'll first be discussing an overview of distributed work, what it is and why it matters, especially today. We'll then cover how to help support these distributed workforces in two key areas, security and collaboration tools, and also show some real Okta workflows with Dropbox, so you understand how the tools work together. Finally, we'll talk to you about how we can bring it all together with Dropbox's new smart workspace, and we'll run through a demo to show you how all of these new features come to life in our smart workspace environment. So let's get into it.

Sarah Urbonas: So, first of all, what is distributed work at Dropbox? We view distributed work as a fundamental idea that teams can collaborate across geos and time zones. Now, this is obviously a trend that we've seen a massive uptick in in the past few months, as many teams are forced to work remotely due to COVID-19, but it's also a trend that we've seen a lot of in a decade. In fact, last year, Forbes conducted a study on the future of work and found that 70% of employees felt that going into the office was no longer necessary. They felt that they could do their jobs remotely from anywhere, whether it was their house or coffee shop. In addition to that, another 23% of fully remote attendees or fully remote employees felt that their organization was fully distributed. They were able to work remotely without feeling the pain or friction point of being on a remote team.

Sarah Urbonas: These efforts have been underway for some time now. In our own organization, Dropbox has both physical offices and remote workers that span across the globe, so keeping business in sync while letting employees do work from anywhere is really power paramount to our success as well. With this vested interest, we intentionally designed Dropbox Business with this trend in mind, building features that help allow teams to collaborate from wherever they are. This has empowered our hundreds of thousands of teams to be able to transition from central physical locations to distributed teams. Businesses today are forced to swiftly foster these distributed work models for extended periods of time, so the question now becomes how do we keep work moving forward and stay aligned, engaged, and in sync when you're not able to be in the same physical space?

Sarah Urbonas: Today, we'll focus on two major areas that can help power your distributed teams: ensuring a secure work environment to protect IP and company information, regardless of team location, and deploying an ecosystem of collaboration tools to help work move forward. By prioritizing these two key areas, your workforce will be able to ensure collaboration at the scale and security your business needs to continue moving forward, while your employees have access to the best of breed tools they love to stay productive. With that.,I'm going to pass it up to my colleague, Rajan, who's going to dive into the first area of focus, security.

Rajan Kapoor: Thanks, Sarah. Hi everyone. My name is Rajan Kapoor, and I am a director of security here at Dropbox, and I'm really excited to talk to you about how security can support distributed workforces. Security has never been harder than it is today. On average, a company manages over 150 SAS applications, and all of these applications need to be configured, audited and secured. While organizations and team structures have become increasingly complex, it's also becoming increasingly difficult to manage them, while at the same time, protecting your data. Getting security right as possible though, you can empower your employees to move to work the way they want to while still securing and protecting your data with Dropbox.

Rajan Kapoor: With content security controls, you can protect your company's most important assets, your intellectual property. From granular content permissions, which I'll go through in a moment here, Dropbox is dedicated to protecting your content. Dropbox continues to be a leader in class security, and we're proud of the tools we've been able to add into the game to ensure your IP is protected. Examples of some of the content controls you get in product with Dropbox include granular content permission, so you can be in control of who has access to your data; legal holds, so you can meet your legal obligations and preserve data that is part of a lawsuit; document watermarking to stop data from leaking encryption in transit and at rest to protect your data wherever it is; and extended version history, which enables you to recover quickly from mistakes like accidental deletions or more malicious attacks like ransomware.

Rajan Kapoor: To be truly effective, teams need the ability to securely access share and organize the content they use every day. That's why Dropbox offers the team controls you need to make sure your team can collaborate securely. Examples of these team controls include granular access controls that help you make sure only the users who should have access to the data they need can get access to it; remote log out and wipe to secure your data, if an employee leaves or devices lost; single sign-on with partners like Okta to support your identity management strategy; team-wide sharing controls to put in place guardrails that help your team be confident they have the right settings in place, and robust account management tools. Along with these enterprise ready controls, Dropbox's user first approach ensures frictionless adoption. This is reflected in the over half a billion users who have chosen us.

Rajan Kapoor: A product is only as secure as the platform and infrastructure it runs on. An environment that's secured from threats, highly available, and scalable is the backbone of any organization. Dropbox's industry leading platform continues to evolve with the most advanced engineering ed research methodologies. Dropbox has been and continues to commit to ensuring that your data is protected in a compliant, resilient and industry leading environment. We have an industry leading bug bounty program that helps us leverage the security community to make sure our service is more secure, and that the investments we're making in security are working.

Rajan Kapoor: Dropbox operates at cloud scale. We have over half a billion users, and we operate at a size that only a handful of companies in the world do. We've had to make the right security and infrastructure investments along the way to get to this scale. We've also designed this infrastructure with the concept of defense in depth. Our infrastructure is designed with layers of security controls that ensures that a single security control failure doesn't lead to a compromise. We've been able to build a modern security team. We've invested in security teams that meet the threat of modern security threats, and these teams work to protect our platform from attacks like account compromise as well as abuse. We've been able to hire some of the best minds in the industry, who have come to us because they're excited to work on the challenges that our scale brings, and the world class security team that we've built becomes an extension of your security team when you trust your data to Dropbox.

Rajan Kapoor: We have a security ecosystem with industry-leading security vendors that provide best-in-class visibility and control for advanced requirements to Dropbox, but also to your broader SaaS environments. When you secure your data, you need to secure not only within a single application, but across all of the applications it may move through as your workflows take that data from one application to another. That's why the security ecosystem is critical. You can wrap your security ecosystem around all of your services, not just a single service, and this is supported by Dropbox by integrating with your existing security investments. You not only enhance your overall security posture, but also are empowered to manage all these SAS apps at scale. With deployment and management partners, you can securely migrate your data and devices to Dropbox. VMware is helping our customers ensure Dropbox is deployed and access is controlled on all devices. With data protection and governance partners, you get unprecedented visibility and control over your Dropbox information and teams. From monitoring user behaviors to enforcing compliance and DLP requirements, partners like BetterCloud provide unparalleled flexibility in how Dropbox Business is governed.

Rajan Kapoor: I'm going to walk through a couple of flows here with Okta that demonstrate the power of this ecosystem, and I'm going to step through three different flows or three different use cases. The first is when you bring on an employee, which you see here. As you bring an employee on, employers, want their new employees to get up and running as quickly as possible. Making sure those employees have access to the tools they need when they start is critical. Dropbox and Okta work together to make sure your onboarding flows can be centralized and leverage the tools you use to make onboarding an employee seamless. In this example, you have your HR system and active directory as sources of truth for the employee's start date, their role, the team that they're on and their network credentials. Okta then automatically provisions that account in Dropbox, while Dropbox leverages group information to make sure employees can use Dropbox on day one to get access to the information they should have access to and only that information.

Rajan Kapoor: During the course of an employee's tenure at a company, they will often go through role changes, and role changes are one of the most difficult workflows to get right. I've seen a lot of organizations that when employees change roles, they request the new access they need, and they forget though to turn off the access they don't need. This historic access is not reviewed or revoked. With Okta and Dropbox, it's easy to automate role-based access controls, making sure your data is only accessible to the employees who should have access to it.

Rajan Kapoor: Another use case where this is important is something hopefully much simpler, but equally important, and an example of that is getting married. If you have an employee whose name changes after they get married, updating that name across all of your services can be difficult. What you often see is someone's name appearing both with their pre-marriage name as well as their post-marriage name. With Okta, again, you can push through the identity changes and have that name updated across all of your services.

Rajan Kapoor: When an employee leaves your organization, offboarding them correctly is important to protecting your data and intellectual property. Making sure your former employees no longer have access to your company's data is critical to protecting that data and to protecting your customers. Again, Okta takes information from the HR system, in this case, seeing that the employee is now a former employee, then deactivates the former employees accounts. Dropbox works with Okta to support automated deep provisioning, as well as remote device wipes to make sure your data is safe and the employees are logged out. With that, I'm going to hand it back to Sarah to talk about collaboration tools. Thank you.

Sarah Urbonas: Awesome. Thanks, Rajan. The base of any distributed workforce is security, making sure that you have the right policies, tools, and people in place to keep your company information secure, regardless of where your employees are working from. The second major pillar of supporting a distributed workforce is ensuring you have the right stack of collaboration tools to power productivity. Now, last year at our customer conference, Work in Progress, we asked attendees to rate what was most important to them when it came to collaboration and regardless of industry, team size, geo, we still have three resounding responses. First, keeping teams on the same page throughout a project. The second, having tools that are easy to use, and the third, having tools that work well together, so clearly employing the right set of SAS tools to keep teams moving forward is top of mind for all of us.

Sarah Urbonas: So how can you integrate all of these collaboration tools together to power a distributed workforce? Well, at the core of collaboration tools, you have your content: projects, files, and information that your team is working on together. Dropbox has a lot of great content collaboration features, such as cloud docs for real time, collaboration, project management tools to help keep the team aligned, and machine learning to help surface the work that matters most, so you can keep your focus. Dropbox is supported across operating systems, and since you don't need a VPN to access your work, you're easily able to access your Dropbox content across devices, so you can stay up to date.

Sarah Urbonas: One benefit to having all of your work in the cloud is that you can access your content from anywhere. This was especially useful for me recently when Dropbox implemented a mandatory work from home policy. I didn't need to rush back to the office and transfer files from one machine to another. Everything that I needed was already safe on my Dropbox files in my laptop, phone and iPad, so the next day I could just wake up and start working from home zero downtime.

Sarah Urbonas: Now let's talk about SaaS tools. As SaaS has matured, employees are benefiting from increased productivity and being able to use the tools that they love. Tools such as Adobe, Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian have built tools that foster remote collaboration at scale. We deeply integrated with these tools and really treat them as first class citizens on our own platform, so our users can use them and experience them and seamlessly as our own native applications. For example, from Dropbox, you can create a Google Doc, you can create a Microsoft Word file, you can start a Zoom meeting, send files to Slack channels, and much more. We're going to show how some of these workflows work and our demo in a little bit, but they're really exciting, so we're excited to show more.

Sarah Urbonas: Now, by having all of these tools integrated into a seamless experience, your team can stay in sync and stay focused throughout projects, regardless of physical location. At Dropbox, we rely heavily on Zoom for meetings, Slack for messaging and our own native tool for content, which has allowed us to maintain business continuity while working from home, and also just maintain that sense of collaboration with one another, even though we can't be in the same space. Now, all of these great collaboration tools are surrounded by the native security features we reviewed earlier to give you control over your content teams and infrastructure, In addition to the integrations with security platforms, you're likely already using VMware, Okta, and BetterCloud. This way, you have the control and visibility you need while your teams are able to work the way they want with the tools they love.

Sarah Urbonas: Beyond these deep integrations, we've worked hard to open up our API and build a robust partner ecosystem that provides our users with the best experience with a plethora of great tools. In doing this, we've prioritized giving customers the choice in how they work and what they work with, whether it's a Dropbox native application or not. Today, we have over 450,000 teams using Dropbox Business, and three quarters of them are already linked to at least one third party approximately, ranging from project management tools like Trello, Asana, or Smartsheet, or productivity tools like Microsoft Office, G Suite and Adobe. We believe that through this partner ecosystem, you'll deliver an enhanced employee experience, build on your existing SAS investments, secure company data, and of course, power remote collaboration. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Alex, who's going to show you the magic of how this all comes together in our smart workspace.

Alex Rountree: Thanks, Sarah. I'm Alex Rountree, and I'm principal architect here at Dropbox. Now that you've learned about Dropbox and security and collaboration features from both our native product and our partner integrations, I'm going to show you a demo of what it actually looks like. As Sarah mentioned, we intentionally designed Dropbox Business to support distributed teams, and our smart workspace reflects that. You now have all of your cloud content, people and tools all in one place. The smart workspace offers deep integrations with the apps your organization uses with the best in class security you've come to expect from Dropbox. This gives users the ability to work without context switching, improving their productivity, and at the same time, it can leverage the ecosystem of SIM apps to get logging across the organization's apps. And all of this has identity at its foundation through Okta. A unified identity model is critical to unifying your logging across your ecosystem. So let's dive into the demo.

Alex Rountree: Now, as you can see here, I jumped into Dropbox on the web, just to show you something that most of you are probably familiar with. As you are probably well aware, you have your files and folders all right here in one place synced locally to my machine, as well as available to me here on the web, so I can see any files and folders that I paired here at the top or starred for quick access. I can see all of my team folders, which are shared to me based on my group membership or role from central IT, and then I have everything else down here, which is my unshared folders, my shareholders, and some of these new Dropbox spaces, which I'll show you here in a moment.

Alex Rountree: Another feature that we have bundled here on dropbox.com is the ability to request files, so that allows you to open up a secure window into a folder inside your Dropbox to allow people to have a one-way upload, so this allows them to quickly gets you files into maybe a shared project folder, but they can't actually see the content in that folder. So we've heard from HR professionals who use this for open recs and they're accepting the resumes. They'll send out a file request, which allow that a candidate to upload that content directly into perhaps a folder for these resumes that maybe you share with the selection committee on the backend, and it allows people to quickly get their work done and find the information that they need right at their fingertips.

Alex Rountree: Now, if I were to, say, jump into maybe this Biology folder, you can see, of course here are the files that I have. I can create new files directly from here, so I can open up and create a Microsoft Word, document, a PowerPoint, even a Google Doc or a sheet or slides, which allows me to keep all of my cloud content bundled with all of my traditional local files, all within this Dropbox folder. Then here at the top, I can provide additional context and information around this information, and this has really been the push for Dropbox for the past year is to provide additional context around the content rather than just being a file repository, because we know that that is super important for collaboration.

Alex Rountree: I can of course use the @ symbol, as you can see here to invite a user to this folder, let them know as a matter of fact that I am in charge of this folder, but then I can also link other files, links to websites, any kind of context that I need to provide, so that people will know quickly at a glance what's going on inside this folder. I can also see all the users who have been shared this folder. I can also upload other folders from here as well, just like you would normally would expect with Dropbox, and quickly get that work done.

Alex Rountree: Now, moving to the smart workspace, we took all of the power that we had on the web and then bumbled it on to a local app that resides on your machine. Again, here, all the folders that I've pinned to the top. Also across here on the left, I have my folders and spaces, and then also through machine learning, Dropbox suggested these folders to the top of the smart workspace, because I use them a lot or maybe I'm collaborating a lot with others who are part of these folders so that I can, again, have this information really quickly and then eliminate a lot of that work about work.

Alex Rountree: Now, when I click on this word document here, I can see a preview of the file over here on the right. I also have the opportunity to open this file and a number of different applications based on the ones that I've connected to my Dropbox account. So again, Dropbox doesn't want to be a friction point, so if you need to quickly send this document off for signature, you can use HelloSign. I can also fax it to a user, if I'm faxing somebody to the past. I also have the ability to send as quickly through Gmail. Also, with the new Dropbox transfer, which allows me to bundle up several files into a secure link, send that out to that user, and allow a user to download a ZIP file on those files. But again, Dropbox is trying to be platform agnostic, so we don't want to make, you have to choose between, for instance, Microsoft Office or Google Apps, or if you want to choose HelloSign or go with DocuSign or Adobe Sign.

Alex Rountree: Now, also from here, I have the ability to share these files, as you can imagine with Dropbox. I can invite via email like I traditionally can with Dropbox, copy a link and paste it into another tool, or I can quickly send this to a Slack thread or to a user through Slack, pin it to a Trello board, or present it in Zoom. Then also, since I am the owner of this file, I can manage the users who already have access to it and revoke it if necessary. We also have some quick picks based on user feedback. A lot of users will send these files through Gmail, so we'll populate this here at the top, so you'll know really quickly at a glance, "Hey, I can quickly extend this with Gmail, send it for signature or send it with Adobe Sign."

Alex Rountree: I still have access to all the users who are, have access to this file. I can click on these users and see if I have any shared meetings or message them directly on Slack, all from within the same interface. I can also leave comments on this file, so I can quickly see the collaboration around this file without even having to open it. Then I can also see any file activity or folder activity if this was a folder, so I could see when users have viewed it, downloaded it, created new files inside of a folder, and I get a lot of that context, which to be honest with missing from the users who were safe versus only using the Dropbox sync engine as the way to access those files. They could see the files. They would get the updates when they came across, but then they would have to go to the web to see what people were actually commenting or collaborating or speaking about this file.

Alex Rountree: Now, if I scroll down here to some of the other files that I have, I can also see here's a PDF that I can click and send off to HelloSign for signature, which will take me right back to the HelloSign interface. Now, I do have to sign in for the authentication here. I can do that really quickly, and then I can send this off signature by quickly adding the file to HelloSign, appending my signature panel, any radio buttons, or any other text boxes that I need to add, and then send it off for signature. Then since I've also integrated this to Dropbox, I can quickly go back to my files and then see inside the HelloSign folder, that file that is sent out for signature as it goes through every step of the chain.

Alex Rountree: Now going back to the new smart workspace, I can also go in and quickly see all of my regular shared folders and these Dropbox spaces which we talked about, and then also any of my team folders, like this. This was a marketing folder here, and then I can see here quickly a link to a paper documents, also any Google docs that I've created, and also get that context around those files and quickly to be able to see, again, just that context that people are providing around the files that we have to share. At a high level, that is the Dropbox experience here, so let me jump back into the slides, and we can go into some customer feedback.

Alex Rountree: So as I mentioned, we're already hearing some great feedback from our customers on how Dropbox is powering remote work. In fact, we have a technical operations manager from a public radio company that told us that Dropbox is the core of what is keeping their production afloat with everyone working remotely. They also said, "What was once primarily a workflow for distributed teams is now workflow for our whole company. The synergy between Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Otter, Google Docs, and Office Docs has literally allowed us to just walk out of the office and keep going with almost then we impact on daily production," similar to what Sarah mentioned earlier in the webinar. We hope that with the security and collaboration Dropbox has enabled, both through our native features and integrations, your organization will also be able to foster distributed teams to ensure business continuity. With that, I'll hand it back to Sarah to close us out.

Sarah Urbonas: Awesome. Thanks Alex. So we're now going to turn it over to Q&A. To ask a question, please post in the chat feature, so we can see it and then answer. As an added incentive, when you ask the question, you'll automatically be entered to win one of 15 remote work power up packs. We're going to be including goodies like speakers, headphones, notebooks, everything you may need to make your remote work a little bit easier and more enjoyable. We're also running our charity program at our booth and have shared the links to the resources mentioned earlier in the chat for folks to help donate. Thank you everyone for joining us today, and hope everybody stays safe and healthy.