Finding files is a 'pain'

Workers today use an average of 6.3 “file silos” – email apps, network drives, cloud storage, and hosted collaboration suites where documents are stored – and more than 76 percent say finding their files is “a pain.” The survey, conducted by enterprise file search software startup Cloudtenna, addressed modern work habits around the use of repositories by employees from a range of enterprises such as media, education, retail, and professional services.

6 years ago Posted in

OneDrive and Google Drive were the most popular cloud file storage services, used by 53 percent each, with Dropbox used by 45 percent and then Box by 32 percent.

Email applications are used as an ersatz file repository, with 74 percent of respondents using Outlook; Gmail is the next most used at 40 percent.

Among enterprise collaboration and sharing tools, Slack is currently the most used, with 22 percent of respondents using it in their workplace. Salesforce (18 percent), Jira (17 percent), and Confluence (16 percent) were named comparatively evenly.

Only 38 percent of workers said they rely on network drives and servers for files, though 12 percent said their files are spread fairly equally across all repositories without relying on one more than another.

With so many file silos in use, it is not surprising that more than 15 percent of workers say finding files is “frequently a pain,” and 63 percent “sometimes a pain.” The other 21 percent reported their files are well organized and finding a file is “never a pain.”

“We were surprised by some of these results, and surprised to see the proliferations of silos these workers use regularly,” said Peter O’Brien, Cloudtenna vice president of business development. “We see the struggle to organize and find files in a modern enterprise, and we think IT managers with responsibility for data management and security in their organizations might be a bit worried by some of these results.”

Finding files is a 'pain'

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