BoxWorks '21: Highlights and takeaways

While this year's BoxWorks was, as always, forward-focused, it's tough to talk about the the future of content without the context of the recent past. As Box CEO Aaron Levie mentioned in his keynote: "We all know that work looks different than it did a year ago. Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword; it's now an imperative. Real-time collaboration happens regardless of whether someone's in the office or in the home or on the go. It needs to happen with security and privacy. And at the center of all that is content."

Content is at the heart of every organization, and BoxWorks '21 held a lot of insights and takeaways across industries. Kirk Koenigsbauer, CVP and COO of Microsoft's Experiences and Devices Group, joined the opening keynote to talk about two integration enhancements around content:

1. Real-time co-authoring across Microsoft Office desktop and mobile apps, with all content saved to Box
2. The ability to default to Box as a storage space in Microsoft Teams

Our interoperability has always been one of the top reasons customers choose Box, and we're thrilled to deepen our integration with one of our most important partners. These integrations enable Microsoft users to rely entirely on the Box Content Cloud as a central content platform even while working in Office and Teams.

Stepped-up Box Shield and Governance features

Security-first has long been the Box approach to cloud content management, and Alok Ojha, VP Products, Security & Compliance, took the stage to talk about our latest product innovations at a pivotal time for content security.

• Box Shieldnow features built-in deep learning-based malware detection so you can contain the spread of malware before it becomes a data breach or a significant loss of business continuity, along with enhancements to our anomaly-detection rules to better detect threats
• Box Governance now offers more flexibility in how you manage your governance, including event-based retention, which allows you to set automatic retention rules around business events — for example, an employee's departure or the end of a contract term

Given that the average cost of a data breach in 2021 ($4.2M) is the highest of the last 17 years, and that regulatory policy is getting more and more complex, the topic of content security is relevant to every organization.

Our most exciting product announcement this year: Box Sign

For a long time, our customers have shared their e-signature pain points: fragmentation of both content and the user experience, expensive point solutions that then have to be managed, and security and compliance gaps. The recent launch of Box Sign answered that call, bringing natively integrated e-signatures right where your content lives in the Content Cloud.

Two of our BoxWorks '21 sessions went deep into the details of Box Sign:

• In the session, Power business-critical approval workflows with Box Sign, Burke Culligan, VP Product Management, Box, hosted a dialog with Garrett Wright, Manager IT and Operations at Benaroya Research in Seattle
• In the session, Streamline e-signature business processes with Box Sign, Box customer Jason Perez, IT director at Charter One, rapped with Amy Gorman, VP of ISV Sales at Salesforce, in a conversation moderated by Vaishnav Gorur, Product Marketing Manager at Box

And we're so excited to share that Box Sign is now available to all our customers with a Business and Enterprise account! You can read more about it in this blog post.

The rise of the Content Cloud

"We all know that work looks different than it did a year ago," deadpanned Alexa Schirtzinger in the intro of the session Unleash your content's potential with new authoring and publishing tools.

The trends that are driving work today are only accelerating. In his keynote, Aaron spoke to the fact that work now happens anywhere and everywhere. He poses the question, "As the pandemic hopefully begins to be reduced, we're going to make a decision: Are we going back to the way things used to operate? Or are we going to find new and more flexible ways of working — ones that leverage the ingenuity and creativity of individuals and also allow us to hire and expand in more locations than ever before, and work in completely new ways?"

Fireside chats with Aaron Levie

And finally, one of the biggest highlights of BoxWorks is always the conversations Aaron holds with innovators, movers, and shakers from some of our favorite customer companies. At this year's BoxWorks, Aaron chatted with:

• Jeetu Patel, EVP & GM, Security & Collab of Cisco (formerly a Boxer), about telepresence and how Cisco scaled its infrastructure quickly and kept customer business up and running through the pandemic — and created a permanent new way of life for the workforce
• Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, about the significant evolution of his company's business model in the past year or two, much of which the pandemic accelerated
• Jason Kilar, CEO of WarnerMedia, about how the pandemic sped up consumer behavior changes that were already afoot and created a sense of urgency about going direct to consumer

Aaron also moderated a panel of the CEOs from Zoom, Slack, and Okta about transforming business and the future of work in a cataclysmic time, and the consensus of this talk can be found in the title of the session: The future of work is best-of-breed.

Indeed, it is. And Box is proud to be the best-of-breed Content Cloud solution for organizations today, working with 67% of the Fortune 500 and countless other companies.

Join us at BoxWorks 2022. Register here.