Championing the Content Cloud

“We take bad things and make them better,” says Dave Johnson, Global CTO of Hilco Global. “Thatʼs sort of my summary of what Hilco does. We take troubled assets and we improve them for you.”

Like so many organizations, this diversified financial services company long relied on on-premises file sharing platforms to store company and client data. In 2014, Hilco brought in Box as a cloud storage solution, but the full potential of the Content Cloud had yet to be realized, even as the workforce became more mobile and the need to collaborate became more intense over the years.

The American financial services holding company has high-profile clients that include major global financial services companies, so Hilco canʼt afford to take risks with its data. The Global IT  team, led by Johnson and recognizing that Box could do a lot more than it was being used for, began an overhaul of content practices and workflows within the company, ultimately transitioning it all to the Content Cloud.

A two-year roadmap of transformation

Hilco became a leader in the global financial space partly by creating a whole new way of looking at data — how itʼs processed, stored, and shared. CTO Dave Johnson says that when he joined Hilco, the file server model being used at the time was “fine,” and people were more or less content with it, but grabbing data and attaching it to emails didnʼt hold the potential of seamless collaboration in the cloud.

Johnson and Susan Nuccio, Head of Information Security, had both come from JLL, another Box customer, and were familiar with what the Content Cloud had to offer. Johnson and Dave Zeisler, Operations Manager, became the champions of a move to Box. Zeisler explains, “We do a lot of analytical work and model building. Across businesses, thereʼs a lot of cooperation and collaboration required. With Box, we can share it all in a way thatʼs highly secure but also highly functional.”

“We knew that for a company like Hilco, our aspiration was to be 100% in the cloud and completely off-prem,” Johnson confirms, “and we believed in the value proposition Box offered.”  This is where Box Consulting came in to collaborate on a two-year roadmap for tech stack improvement, building on the capabilities Hilco had already established with Box and transforming their use to take full advantage of the Content Cloud.

From flagging confidence to full faith

Box Consulting helped boost the partner relationship between Box and Hilco by advising on better use of the Content Cloud. These were the steps Box Consulting took:

• Looked at the types of content being circulated, including a lot of client data created using Microsoft Office, as well as photographs
• Interviewed staff already using Box to gain an understanding of their behavior
• Recommended a combination of Box Drive and the web version of Box to various teams
• Hosted training on how staff could make their particular jobs easier with Box, and specifically how it could help with sharing big digital files

Because Hilco is a company that grows mostly by acquisition, there are constantly new teams coming on board — some of them already savvy cloud users. For them, Box is a familiar and logical tool, which has made change management easier for IT.  “They had seen tools like Box, if not Box specifically.  So weʼve been able to really push it out, and thatʼs helped to promote the cloud solution,” says Zeisler.

For select teams, Hilco then deployed Box Relay for workflows. “Relay was one of the things that really helped,” says Zeisler. “We're now getting more sophisticated users and more sophisticated use cases helping us push the limits of Box. Itʼs fantastic.”

With 650 seats, today, everyone in the company uses Box. Different teams use it for different specific reasons. For example,  the Hilco Valuations Machinery & Equipment Team often uses Box to share large digital photographs.

More importantly, the entire company has gone from a “zero-confidence in content sharing” rating to full faith in the Content Cloud. Now, Hilco has customized workflow support, and it also  has more secure content.

The full potential of Box Shield

Nuccio says, “My role is to create a safe, secure place that meets all of the security standards of all of our large global financial-services clients to store their important data.”

Box was a critical choice in increasing the company’s maturity when it comes to information security, and Hilco takes advantage of Box Governance, Box Zones, and Box Shield. Shield in particular added peace of mind by:

• Banishing publicly shared links that created  exposure risks
• Deploying classification to guard sensitive content
• Giving instant insight into anomalies and other security risks with Box alerts

Employees have been appreciative of the new content security measures.  “I thought they were going to squawk when we put down these controls,” says Nuccio, “but they actually like it because they can tell their clients the data is secure. They feel a great deal of ownership over how Shield helps protect our companyʼs data.”

Knowing exactly what data is at stake with the insight Box provides, then classifying that data in appropriate ways with Shield, enables the team to better safeguard content. Zeisler backs this up:  “We now come through security audits with flying colors because of Box.”

Buh-bye on-prem file servers, hello future

The end result of these efforts was a stronger partnership between Box and Hilco and a breakup of the logjam that had been happening with content. Hilco is now, once and for all, able to decommission on-premises file servers entirely and reap the benefits of modern data security — of critical importance to clients and investors in the financial arena.

ITʼs top three favorite things about Box?

1. “Secure, that's the number one thing. The other is that it never limits growth.”
2. “It’s  very intuitive for an end user and has the capacity to grow with us.”
3. “Box is a really great support organization and has some very smart people working for it that help solve problems.”

Box helps us meet our security and storage needs, and also helps meet the needs of our users when they want to get data or share data with clients or collaborate with them on projects.