Yonder unlocks value for clients

Where data meets possibility

At Yonder Consulting, content isn’t just information. It’s the springboard for unlocking value for clients. The process starts with in-depth market research and data gathering, surfacing actionable insights that help clients think ahead, stay ahead, and create lasting impact in a fast-moving world. Yonder, a strategic transformation company where insight and imagination converge, collaborates across a wide range of content. From survey data and PII to meeting notes, video chat transcripts, emails, contracts, project management docs, presentations, deliverables, and beyond, Yonder turns complex information into clarity — and clarity into confident action.

With Intelligent Content Management, Yonder’s team taps into the value of all this content, which makes work both more efficient and more meaningful.  From the beginning to the end of each project, all content lives in Box. Partner Rich Cownley says, “Box has allowed us to access our files in a more efficient way, which gives the team more time back to do thoughtful work — where we bring the value.”

In his role heading up Future Tech and Digital at Yonder, Cownley focuses on innovation in both methodology and delivery. He describes life prior to Box, when on-prem servers were “great for security, but a blockage to collaboration, making it ever so difficult to share things with our clients.” His team needed to streamline the process of collaboration and find a secure, reliable way to improve content workflows.

They initially chose Box because of its enterprise and security credibility, but  what began as a way for Yonder to create, collaborate, and secure content has now — with Intelligent Content Management — become so much more.

Content organized, accessible, and actionable per project

Often, a new client project begins with a market survey. From there, Yonder’s consultants create a custom report of their findings, giving the client access to specific reporting and documentation. Feedback comes in. Ideas crop up.  Iterations ensue.  And it all happens on Box. Cownley calls Box “the linchpin of data from the source  all the way to us sharing recommendations,” and says, “In every case study, all the insights come into Box in the first place. It’s a foundational layer.”

To put an organizational layer on individual projects, Box Hubs provides a way to present content in context and paint the full picture. Here, project teams can create content portals to aggregate specific folders and files and point to the correct contacts.

Box Hubs are particularly useful when sharing data and content with: 

• Clients: Easier sharing allows creative work to take the spotlight 
• Prospects: Teams can share examples of the kind of work Yonder can do 
• Freelancers: Secure permissions limit access to just the project files and folders freelancers need 

With AI integrated into Box Hubs, people at Yonder can also query sets of documents and get answers to specific questions or summaries of groups of files. It’s a quick way to surface insights, trends, and themes that are useful to both team members and clients. Cownley says, “Box allowed us to take that unstructured data and access that in ways that weren’t possible before.”

A gateway into the world of AI

AI is being integrated into everyday work thanks to Intelligent Content Management and the tools Box provides. Box Hubs is just one of the ways Yonder has been able to lower the barrier to adopting AI in recent years.

Within Box Notes, people can spin up first drafts of anything, from emails to presentation copy, reducing obstacles to creating new content — something that can be a real job-stopper for people. With Box AI for Slack, if someone messages Cownley with a 20-page policy document, he can use Box AI to instantly draft a quick summary and respond in an informed way without having to read the entire thing.

Cownley notes that Box AI is particularly useful for two major employee groups:

1. Early AI adopters, who benefit from the guardrails and AI principles Box provides 
2. AI-hesitant employees, who now have the encouragement and tools to get started 

“Box AI is extremely easy for people initially,” says Cownley. “It’s just a click of a button in the top right-hand corner of a file, so it’s a safe way to experiment with AI — at the standard and secure level that Box provides.” Yonder is now able to encourage company-wide use of AI without worrying about the security of the company’s and clients’ data.

71 TB of content embedded in workflows

During the Covid pandemic, Yonder’s original 20 Box licenses quickly became 200. “Almost overnight,” Cownley says, “ we had the entire company and all of our data lifting and shifting straight into Box.” Yonder now uses Box for “pretty much everything,” including:

• Box Sign for signing client contracts 
• Box Governance for classifying files 
• Box Shield for an extra layer of protection against malware 

These extra security measures help protect the 71 TB of content that Yonder has stored on Box so far. With a capacity for unlimited data storage, Cownley’s team doesn’t have to worry about that number rising — nor do they have to worry about the integrity of their content as it does.

Box Shield enables the IT team to monitor how data is being accessed, where it’s being accessed from, and if there are variances in the way people are using data. If a user suddenly downloads a large number of files or logs in from an anomalous location, Box Shield alerts the IT team, who can then decide whether to take action and lock down that person’s account. In fact, in a period of just 90 days, Box Shield caught 25 potential security issues.

But security goes way beyond malware threats. “It’s really important to make sure we’re monitoring how data is being accessed,” says Cownley, “and that all our confidential files are being kept in areas that can only be accessed by certain members of the team. Plus, regulations have to be adhered to.”

Integrations, APIs, and compliance round out content

In a more general sense, the ability to automatically provision secure folders has sped up work while amplifying security.  And a treasure trove of Box integrations makes work seamless across all the apps employees use every day. For instance, the team integrates Box with Microsoft 365 and Slack in order to quickly share files via practical channels and any device. With Box for Salesforce, as a client moves from prospective customer to active project status, it’s simple to keep folders consistent and properly permissioned. Box Sign also makes signing contracts extra easy along the way.

On the back end, engineers at Yonder use Box APIs to connect survey data from a proprietary platform into Box. As a result, Cownley says, “We know the data is going from one secure environment directly to another secure environment without any middleman.”

For instance, all clients in Europe are subject to GDPR regulation, so Box Shield enables the team to classify content for those clients at a higher level of security, and an extra step is required to share content in this realm with external stakeholders. Yonder can also apply automatic file deletion dates — another important aspect of adhering to GDPR.

In addition to GDPR, the firm is subject to regulations such as Cyber Essentials, ISO27001 (which they are working toward), and ISO 20252. Cownley says, “Box is one of the best-in-class platforms, so it allows you to meet those requirements almost out of the box,” and adds, “We use Box Shield to monitor how our Box Governance enables the team to define and lock down classification on files.”

A world of content possibility in one central place

With all these capabilities built into one Intelligent Content Management platform, Cownley says, “Our vision is to make sure we expand our partnership with Box, because it really aligns with our vision at Yonder around customer-driven, outcome-focused strategies.”

The top three things Yonder loves about Box, according to Cownley:

1. Reliability: “It’s just a reliable place we know is secure and governed, so we can assure our clients we’re giving them what they would expect from us when they give us their data to work with.” 
2. Usability: “We needed to make sure we had a secure, frictionless, easy-to-use process for our team.” 
3. Partnership: “Box is great to work with — a collaborative relationship, there to answer the questions we have.” 

 

Box gives us a reliable, secure, friction-free platform.

— Rich Cownley, Partner, Yonder