Survey Shows Workers Use Average of 6.3 File Silos – Cloudtenna

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% say finding their files is “a pain.”

The survey, conducted by enterprise file search software start-up 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.

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

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

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

Only 38% of workers said they rely on network drives and servers for files, though 12% 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% of workers say finding files is “frequently a pain,” and 63% “sometimes a pain.” The other 21% 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 VP 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.“

Cloudtenna’s DirectSearch, now in beta, works universally across on-premise repositories, cloud file storage services, and hosted/online applications. The search-once-and-done tool can find files by name, sender, date, file type, keyword, content, and other attributes regardless of where it is stored. DirectSearch uses machine learning intelligence, natural language processing, and automation to deliver relevant results and rankings fast – in 400-600ms.