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by airstrike 2056 days ago
> If your admin allows it you're fine.

In the big enterprise world, you don't even get to ask your admin if it's fine. Every answer is a "no" by default unless you have an extremely compelling case. Sharing data outside of the network is a major no-no for certain industries (like mine, which is Financial Services)

> sending them per email is the same level of safety/security.

Not exactly. My company logs every e-mail I send / receive, but not every HTTP request. If we're ever sued, the e-mails may show up in court, but not HTTP.

And if you're ever sued, what happens to the data I e-mailed?

3 comments

In case some entrepreneur gets discouraged by this comment, I'd like to add some personal color (currently building B2B product). The commenter is correct that IT admins take a conservative stance ("no" by default) but that doesn't mean your startup can't break into big enterprise using a bottoms-up motion. Unless the business is in a highly regulated industry, employees will sign up to try the product and, in most cases, won't ask IT for approval.

This is indicative of a broader trend in how software is distributed in the enterprise. Whereas software was traditionally purchased tops-down (i.e. CIO purchasing decision), today's software products are increasingly product-led & bottoms-up (i.e. end user purchasing). Classic examples include Dropbox, Slack and now Notion, Airtable, etc.

Just want to say I agree 100%. Thanks for adding this nuance.
In the EU sharing data outside the network is a huge no-no now regardless of industry.

A self-hosted option that the company can install on a VM somewhere would be the only option for 99.999% of meetings.

Makes sense :) Not the direction we want to take for now as I mentioned. Thanks for sharing!
Oh ok that makes sense! Yeah in that case, our app might not be the best fit if you're thinking of taking notes that can contain highly sensitive data.

Thanks for sharing! That will definitely impact us if we want to sell to enterprise. But to be honest, we don't plan on going into that direction.

We're bootstrapped, so no big pressure on getting really big. We're super happy to just become a profitable business that our users enjoy, à la Basecamp.