The value proposition of converting your capex dollars to opex dollars, outsourcing what is critical and not core, do more with less (people or dollars) are some of the new age mantra’s.  So, going to the cloud is a no brainer? Not quite.

Cloud should not be an all or nothing value proposition. Specific to Egnyte, you can certainly move all your files to our cloud and securely access and share them with pretty much any device. But, being in our cloud or in fact any other “public cloud” should not imply that you lose control of your data. Data that traditionally resided behind your firewall, that you could literally touch, now resides in the cloud. I can bet that compared to 99.99% of businesses who do it themselves, i.e. buy their own file server, do their own disaster recovery, have VPN for remote access, our security in terms of data encryption, data mirroring etc. is better. Yet, more than perception management, reality is that if you are totally in the cloud, you have to deal with latency issues, deal with the fact that if that remote office of yours lost internet connectivity you will have no access to your files. And in certain industries it is a compliance issue having data not readily available (on-premise or otherwise). The answer to all this is the HybridCloud.

HybridCloud enables you to take control or the cloud. That is our core positioning and fundamental to our value proposition to our customers. We want to make sure that you can leverage the unlimited storage capability and ease of access of the cloud, combined with on-premise local data giving you fast, off-line access capability. It is in this direction that we continue to evolve the Egnyte product.

So much so, that you will see our billboards on 101 and our ads in AllThingsD. And that is just the start

Imagine one of these scenarios:

Employee A, for whatever reason, has not worked out at the company, and it’s been decided that it is necessary to terminate them. Because there was no solution for file sharing in place, they created a free account with one of the free cloud file sharing providers. Employee A is fired, but while their computer is returned and the local files are safe, a copy of several critical files, useful to partners or competitors, remain in the cloud in a private account. While that account may have been opened to help them do their job, it now provides them with easy access to proprietary files from a company that just fired them.

Employee B got an offer from the competition to go work for them. They also signed up for a free file sharing account and since their departure was unexpected they were able to upload whatever files to the cloud they thought might be useful before giving notice. Unfortunately, without some kind of tracking and auditing, who knows what they were able to take. Is it worth the risk?

Departments C, D and E have several employees, all of whom are bright and dedicated go-getters. In their drive to succeed, they individually realized they did not have a good way of sharing and collaborating on files with employees and partners onsite and off. Without a solution they all, unbeknownst to each other or IT, opened up different free cloud file sharing accounts.

Without thinking about the bigger picture, and most concerned with being successful in their own tasks, they inadvertently created footprints, littering proprietary corporate files across the Internet, and very likely the world. Some of those proprietary files may even be resident in countries with laws that prevent easy retrieval or protection.

What does this all mean? You need a solution that will give you control while offering your employees much needed access to sharing and collaboration. What should you look for? A solution that:

• Offers a standardized service that allows coworkers, consultants and partners to collaborate on files, no matter where they are located
• Stops access to files instantly
• Creates an audit trail of who has looked at what files, and what they did with them
• Gives different people different types of access to files (read/read, write/read, write, delete),
• Better enables collaboration with sync across multiple devices both behind the firewall and in the public cloud
• Provides enterprise grade encryption to protect your data both up in the cloud, and on any resident devices your employees have

Don’t litter your critical company files across cyber space and open yourself up to serious potential threats. Take control, while still giving your employees the means to share and collaborate with each other and business partners. The longer you let free cloud file sharing services proliferate at your company, the more your important corporate data will find it’s way around the Internet.

By Doug Drinkwater, TabTimes 

January 31, 2012

To learn more, watch this video!

BusinessNewsDaily’s sister site, TopTenREVIEWS, recently reviewed the best online storage services and found two that clearly stand out from the rest: SugarSync and Egnyte HybridCloud. Here’s a breakdown of what these services offer. The complete top ten listing of online storage services can be found here.

Why These Online Storage Services Are the Best

SugarSync and Egnyte might not be the biggest names that come to mind when you think about online file storage, but they each have impressive security features, helpful support and convenient collaborative capabilities that lift them above the rest.

Features

The two most important features for online storage services for businesses are undoubtedly accessibility and collaboration. You likely find yourself constantly on the go, with only a few minutes here and there to sit down and put some ideas in a document or run some figures in a spreadsheet. Frequently, you don’t have the same device with you at all times, and more often, you’re not the only one who needs access to your business’s files.

SugarSync and Egnyte solve this problem by giving you file storage in the cloud that you can access from any Internet-connected device. You can store files of any type in your personal drive, from presentations and spreadsheets to demo videos and trial applications. You can also share access to this drive with anyone you choose, so you can share documents in a localized space with clients, employees, managers and investors — all with the same service.

Security

Security is always a concern when crucial business files are involved, and SugarSync and Egnyte make it easy to put your mind to rest. Your files are encrypted during transfer as well as when they find a home on the companies’ servers. Your files are also password protected, wherever you access them. You can even restrict access to certain files to users with high levels of clearance so you don’t accidentally give an intern access to potential budget cuts, for example.

Space

Storage is important, and doubly so when you have a wealth of documents that you need to pass around. Both SugarSync and Egnyte provide enough storage in a standard plan to give you breathing room for presentations, spreadsheets and documents. If you need to store a great deal of media, such as photos and videos, you might need a larger plan. Both services offer up to 1TB of storage at their maximum advertised prices, with more space available on a case-by-case basis.

Support

Losing access to your budget or a time-sensitive news release is a business owner’s nightmare, so responsive, helpful customer support is critical. Both services offer a wide variety of contact methods, FAQs, tutorials and fail-safes in case of just such an emergency. Types of support range from the standard online user manuals to phone and email support.

By Mitch Monsen, Business News Daily

January 21, 2012

I have a few pointers in that direction …

• Don’t mix Consumer Cloud Services & Enterprise Class Services
• Use hybrid storage cloud rather than a pure cloud-only service
• Manage the data lifecycle effectively
• Match the business requirements and the domain impedance
• Pay attention to data interoperability

Please allow me to explain …

a) Don’t mix Consumer Cloud Services & Enterprise Class Services

There is a marked difference in terms of control and management when it comes to enterprise cloud storage. Never mix a bit-locker class storage cloud and enterprise data.

Enterprise class storage services have well-structured permission capabilities, directory level sync capabilities, a very detailed administrative layer with well defined user onboarding primitives and strong security policies. Enterprise class control and visibility is the key. The best practice whether you are a small, medium or large business is to use an Enterprise Class cloud storage provider for your enterprise storage and the risk of a shutdown is minimal. There is still a small chance … so follow the rest of the pointers.

b) Use a hybrid cloud storage solution rather than a pure cloud-only service

Now that you have chosen the Enterprise Class cloud storage, the next pointer is to use Hybrid Cloud rather than a cloud-only solution. In a hybrid cloud storage solution, the cloud acts as an intermediary that maintains a super set of your data, with the local cloud acting as the primary storage.

• The local cloud storage can be a set of NAS devices (or virtual appliances) in your organization (with multiple devices at different locations/branch offices) or personal local clouds on people’s laptops.
• Talking about what I know best, Egnyte has well honed sync algorithms that are capable of syncing the local clouds with the Egnyte cloud continuously, on demand or periodically.
• The permissions and groups are maintained consistently and coherently across the local and remote clouds .

In many ways the hybrid cloud is the answer to Paul Samuelson’s dilemma “have one’s cake and eat it too …”

If your local NAS box (or the laptop hard disk) crashes, the remote cloud acts as backup; and the local cloud acts as backup if your cloud service goes down …

c) Manage the data lifecycle effectively

Another important aspect of a good storage scheme is to manage the lifecycle – all data are not created equally. Usually enterprise data has a temporal affinity – for example revisions and versions are important while working on a proposal or a presentation, but after the proposal is submitted only the last couple of versions are of interest. In Egnyte’s case, we maintain versions of the documents (the version policy can be tweaked by the admin) thus giving you the ability to track changes between versions as well as the ability to traverse between versions created by different folks working on the document. Of course, the merge has to be done manually – but the information is not lost.

I think this is an important feature especially in this busy world. Overwrites happen, simultaneous updates are facts of life – the best way is to accept them and have a way to succeed in spite of the maddening crowd!

Back to the main feature discussion, the best practice is to keep the earlier versions only in the cloud and keep working the set in a scalable cloud storage provider like Egnyte.

d) Match the business requirements and the domain impedance

This is related to the data life cycle, but from a data organization perspective. The business requirements span a spectrum – effective collaboration, exchange information not only between employees but also partners and customers, data retention, business continuity as well as compliance requirements. Naturally, choosing an Enterprise class cloud provider and using a Hybrid Cloud storage model mitigates some of these risks. But the question at hand, is how do you mitigate the risk of a disruption of the cloud service provider with effective collaborative sharing as opposed to consumer media storage is interesting.

As I had pointed out earlier, the hybrid cloud acts as the mitigation strategy for the disruption of the cloud. The laptops and the local cloud devices (NAS/Virtualized appliances) act as the 1^st line of storage,.

But if you want to be more cautious, you can have a separate secondary cloud provider just for periodically backing up your data (especially the older versions) while using a primary hybrid cloud like Egnyte for daily operations and collaborative sharing.. Even though I work for Egnyte, I have no problem in suggesting this strategy, our goal is for you to be confident, strong and succeed …

e) Pay attention to data interoperability

This is important. You don’t want to be in a platform that is “vendor lock in”. In Egnyte’s case, we do not have any form of vendor lock-in. You can fire up a PLC or an ELC and replicate all your data. The data is stored in normal directories in that device and will be there even after you have terminated your account with us.

We are a strong proponent of interoperability and open interfaces. In fact, this Monday, I am going to participate in the SNIA CDMI Cloud Storage Interoperability forum. And we plan to develop an interoperable CDMI interface as an app over our platform APIs.

Finally, the answer to “To Cloud or not to cloud” is “Thou shall use Enterprise-grade Hybrid Cloud and that too from Egnyte … “ And, sure, Box-ing is an honorable alternative, if you are in a small organization …;o)

Krishna Sankar, Lead Architect, Egnyte

With the new app, you can now:

• Download email attachments directly to Egnyte
• Bookmark Egnyte subfolders for quick access
• As an administrator, you can edit permissions within the app
• Edit Microsoft Office files using Quickoffice with Egnyte