The Butterfly Effect of Data Sharing

“Making something and sending it out into the world and then people not only responding to it but adopting it for their own and making a separate thing for it, that's beautiful. It just shows you how much you can affect other people... the butterfly effect of everything you put out into the world.”

-- Marketa Iglova, Czech singer-songwriter, musician and actress

Data is omnipresent; from electrons to deep-water coral reefs, there is abundant data embedded in every perceivable object in the universe. Over centuries, humans have learned to leverage this data and alter their lives in ways that no other living organism on Earth has managed to accomplish. Gathering and processing information has been the cornerstone of human evolution.

The availability of data does not automatically imply meaningful interpretation by its recipients. What if a future generation discovers the remnants of the Large Hadron Collider a thousand years from now and deduces that it was a large tunnel for transporting frozen goods around the Franco-Swiss border? The intended information can be understood only if the data is presented in the right format or context at the relevant time and through the most appropriate access points.

Cloud storage, with its attributes of unlimited storage capacity, commoditization of IT services, global reach and extremely low costs, has unleashed a “gold rush” for businesses migrating data from local storage to the cloud. A plethora of businesses have adopted cloud storage as an additional tier, if not the primary storage tier. But once this cloud rush happens, companies quickly realize that their business data needs to be regulated and structured in the cloud.

As an example, one of our enterprise customers initially deployed a cloud-only solution and migrated all of their data to the cloud only to be hit with significant time delays when they downloaded large media files, made small modifications and then uploaded these files back to the cloud. They switched to Egnyte’s hybrid offering Storage Sync in order to overcome such network round-trip latency.

Egnyte focuses on delivering data as meaningful information in a timely manner. Customers expect their files to be available at any access point, and we provide the technology that enables just that. Presenting data at any end point is just one parameter to the complex equation of sharing information. The harder aspect of the equation is to regulate the data flow in such a way that the user is not inundated with irrelevant information.Egnyte’s policy-based sync addresses this aspect of data regulation and information structuring in the cloud. Customers must have the ability to dictate what data gets synced to the cloud, not just for the first time but also throughout the business continuum. In order to achieve this, policy-based sync allows IT teams to set sync policies that allow users to upload certain types of files and prevent other file types from moving to the cloud.Customers must also have the ability to dictate which files get synced first. If PDF files are deemed mission-critical to your business, IT might want to prioritize these files over, let’s say, users’ JPEG files. Policy-based sync allows for sync prioritization based on each business’ unique needs.In addition, customers need the ability to set the direction of sync in such a way that business data flows from one access point to another. This might be a geographical location hosting a NAS server, or it might just be an individual’s mobile device. Consider a construction business that has its engineers in Denver produce design templates on an EMC VNX server. These files need to reach subcontractors across the U.S. on their mobile devices, and eventually this data needs to get archived in the cloud after the project is edited and saved. Policy-based sync is the conveyor belt that carries this data across the various stages in its life cycle.Ultimately, we want businesses to adopt Egnyte and share stories on how we’ve helped solve their specific file sharing and data access use cases. The journey from data to meaningful information can be long; apples fell from trees long before Newton was born. We will endeavor to present data in the most efficient form with the goal that something impactful emerges from it. That’s the butterfly effect that we want to put out into the world.