5 questions to ask your new file sharing vendor

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Vineet Jain

Deciding on any new vendor, especially one that will handle something as critical as your employee’s files, can be a difficult and daunting task.  With over 30,000 customers and a million end users, we wanted to take a moment to share with you some of what we learned.  Here are 5 things you should remember to be focusing on when getting down to brass tacks with your vendors.

1.    I want to leverage my existing storage infrastructure, how do you integrate?  This question is one that’s asked time and time again by our customers, and it’s critical to understand what’s going to happen.  Will the new vendor be able to handle a heterogeneous environment? What happens if you have multiple office location and multiple NAS devices from different vendors (IBM, NetApp, EMC)? If necessary, can the service run locally behind the firewall or do I have to push everything into the cloud?

2.    I’ve got multiple cloud services going through my Internet connection, will your solution help avoid saturation of this connection?  One of the unknown consequences of the movement to cloud solutions is that the pipe that serves your company hasn’t necessarily grown to meet the demands of the 10 or even 20 different cloud services your users are using. How will the service handle Internet bandwidth saturation? It may be great that employees have these new tools, but not if it takes them 15 minutes to download one file because everyone is working at the same time.

3.    We have data, and it’s increasingly constantly, what about scale? Syncing a user’s PC is one thing, but when you’re talking about multiple offices and multiple NAS or SAN devices that you have data sitting on, that’s a different story. Make sure and understand how many files a vendor can sync, and just because 10,000 files is enough today, 6 months from now, that’ll seem small.  Think millions, at least, and don’t forget to multiply that by the number of remote offices you’ll be supporting.

4.    Who can see what, and can I monitor what’s going on?  It’s not simply about basic permissioning, you need to think about the intricacies of who can see what, and what they are allowed to do, down to the sub-sub-sub-sub folder. It’s also important for compliance reasons, from FINRA to HIPAA, that you be able to run audit reports to track access to sensitive files. Of course, don’t forget to understand support for Active Directory and LDAP.

5.    What does your “in the office” experience look like?  Get a good understanding of what your users are doing, and where many of them are coming from. When in the office, will your employees get LAN speeds when sharing and syncing their files or will they get shared Internet speeds? The difference between these two forms of access is significant.  With ever increasing file sizes even for basic programs like Excel, this becomes critical to understand, as it affects worker productivity as well as user experience.

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January in the Egnyte office

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Vineet Jain

January is always an extremely busy month at Egnyte as we lock and load several plans for the year, including the operating plan.  We finished 2012 on a great note – Bookings/GAAP Revenue/ARPU – all metrics, grew at an excellent pace.  But there is not much time to savor the wins, every month present its own NMRR challenges, and the numbers are invariably always higher than the previous month.

The class of customers, in terms of size, the amount of data they start with and grow to in six months, the number of concurrent users per account – have galloped ahead at incredible speeds. I remember in 2010 the average storage per customer used to be 20-30 GB in 3 months, today the average is 1 TB. In terms of data growth across our data centers, we used to get 4TB/week in 2009 and today the rate of ingest is north of 12TB/every six hours!

An extremely exciting growth area for us has been hybrid deployments using Netapp storage systems for on-premise fast local access. Month to date, we have deployed Egnyte at a substantial number of companies ranging from a 28,000 person public company to several mid-market companies both in and outside the US.

These are exciting times in the industry, and this solution space is just about to get mainstream. We are beginning to focus more outside North America and already a substantial part of the revenue is coming from overseas.

It is quite gratifying to bump into people who use Egnyte and rave about it.  A few weeks back, one of our team members had to help some person in a mall parking lot get their car started with jumper cables, and this guy looks up– sees the Egnyte logo on the jacket he was wearing, and exclaims, “wow, you work at Egnyte? We’ve been your customer for the past 2 years and love the product”.

Another even more important sign that Egnyte is getting popular was, when I got home last night, my little boy proudly showed me this artwork.

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5 Top Resolutions for IT in 2013

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Vineet Jain

Every year we take a moment to reflect on the previous year, and in doing so, we usually come up with a multitude of things that we can do better. Often those involve dieting, quitting bad habits or being nicer to certain people. Yet we seldom take a moment to reflect on our jobs and ways in which we can do things better, smarter or more efficiently.  It’s with that backdrop that I decided to pen a few thoughts of my own on the top five new years resolutions for IT and the Cloud:

1. Own it:  Getting control over your house doesn’t mean you have to impose draconian measures, but frankly, the BYOD movement has changed the rules a bit.  Take time to really own the problems your company faces, understand them, and ultimately create solutions that are based on a marriage between the realities of the front line and technology. Focus on applications and data, and worry less about the desktop, give them what they need, where they need it. Find the themes in what you hear from employees, determine the use cases and look for technology that solves that use case. Equally importantly, be aware that what works for personal use may not scale for the entire company.

2. Secure it: The cloud can be a demilitarized zone fraught with problems waiting to blow up in your face leaving your data scattered in a thousand pieces. That doesn’t mean you should ignore it, nor does it mean run head first into a cloud deployment. Rather, determine how much of your data is truly “sensitive” (I’ve heard it can be as little 20%) and work on a deployment that allows you to access the bulk of your data in the cloud, and maintain stricter local control over sensitive data.  

Additionally, don’t ignore the personal storage landmine as it’s one that can quietly explode in your face. Determine policies for using (or not using) personal file sharing solutions. What most companies don’t realize (or acknowledge) is that if you’ve got multiple users using their own accounts, when they leave the company, of their own will or not, your data likely leaves with them.  Retrieving it will be messy and painful, and you likely have your data in tens, hundreds or even thousands of accounts at different providers, potentially located all over the world. Secure it before it’s a bigger problem than it already likely is.

3. Live it: Keep on top of the latest developments, and spend at least 10-20% of your work time understanding the latest developments in the IT and cloud world.  This is really less about the actual developments and more about the mindset of not being stagnant.  There’s nothing worse then an IT department that can’t keep up with its users (think BYOD). This isn’t to say you have to implement every new and improved mouse trap some startup is hawking, but it is about being aware and forever optimizing.  This won’t only help your career, it’ll likely help your company, and perhaps employees will appreciate you a bit more.

4. Breathe it: When you buy a car, you take it for a test drive right? Keep that mindset and dedicate yourself to trying more new things more often. Vendors have changed, times have changed, and the speed of new versions and roll-outs have definitely changed. Pilot projects can be done quickly and easily, and you don’t have to create some perfect plan to roll it out to the entire company.  With low cost and speed in mind, try a 10-25 person pilot including not only end users but also, admins. Keeping overhead low for a potentially huge return, makes sense in this new world of the cloud.

5. Work it: Shine, in everything you do, and that means getting consensus for your projects. You can’t take an “if I build it they will come” attitude when implementing your projects, so you’ll need to work that project. If you can solve the day “0” problem, i.e. implement in less than 30 minutes and show value within a day, you’ll have a higher likelihood of success.  Work your connections, get internal buy-in, and learn to sell a little. After all, the more successful your project, the more political capital you have when you want to implement your next project.

By Vineet Jain, Computerworld

January 4, 2013

Click here for original article

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5 Predictions for 2013

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Vineet Jain

We’re just a few weeks away from the new year and I’ve been reflecting on the new developments that will have the biggest impact on the cloud and IT in 2013. I’ve narrowed it down to five key trends and look forward to seeing how each of them shape the industry over the next 12 months.

  1. We can rebuild IT, we have the technology – and the technology is changing the way that IT works. Over the years, we’ve learned a few things from the Six Million Dollar man, and IT is going to have to be faster and stronger to keep up with the tech revolution. That means a class of IT pros who are as likely to have MBAs and Product Management pedigrees as they are to be gamers and nerds.
  2. Reduce, reuse, recycle – is not just a mantra for plastics anymore, and Enterprise companies are going to be focused on these three things. Reducing costs and redundancies by using cloud solutions. Reusing what they’ve already invested in, why throw it away if you can cloud enable it? Finally, recycling the old ideas we wanted to throw away because our minds were clouded by the cloud. Focus is on the fundamentals for 2013.
  3. Beam me up scotty – Gone are the days of year long sales cycles, lengthy POCs and 12-18 month implementation plans. Enterprises will have to catch up to the craziness caused by BYOD, BYOW, and all the other acronyms that crowded 2012. And what’s more, IT will have to do it at warp speeds or get lost in the ether.
  4. Enterprise is the new black – Ok, so last year Hybrid was the new black, but as Heidi Klum says about the fashion world, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out (well not totally). With consumer IPOs tanking, we’re going back to the basics, and enterprise software that’s designed to have a real ROI and business use is where it’s at.
  5. Welcome to the Data Revolution – while many in the world are looking to create borders, the enterprise will try and remove them. This year we’ll see a move to disaggregate data access from data location. Behind the firewall, third party cloud, public cloud, in the closet, under a bed, enterprises will want to control where the data lives, but want employees to do their work without worrying about accessing it.

Predicting the next 12 months of movement in the tech industry is always difficult, but talking with many of our customers, it’s become clear that IT and the Enterprise stand front and center. As we move from traditional enterprise product life cycles to steady streams of enhancements and new features, it’s inevitable that it will affect everything from sales cycles to implementation cycles and more. IT will have to take a business use case approach to building products for internal consumption, and they’ll have to do it in a quarter the time. Attention spans are shrinking, and employee tolerance joined with a do-it-yourself mentality has them chomping at the bit for solutions, yesterday.

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From Egnyte Partner Softchoice Cloud: The 4 Musts for Business-Class Filesharing SaaS

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Jacqueline Girouard

Getting ahead of consumer SaaS applications like Dropbox puts IT leaders on the search to provide file sharing mobility within the context of an internal cloud services brokerage.

Softchoice and Egnyte share a common belief. The cloud alone is not enough. Together we bring together enterprise grade-mobility file sharing with Egnyte and the ability to accelerate internal cloud brokerage delivery with Softchoice Cloud.

Below, we identify the four major recommendations for file sharing evaluation and illustrate where Egnyte provides a specific response to the most common requirements.

#1. SaaS Provider Heritage

The heritage not only defines the architectural model but provides insight into where licensing and overall management will stack up when compared with alternatives. Egnyte, founded in 2008, focused directly on the enterprise space, building direct integration with enterprise NAS appliances and designing the architecture to address the needs for centralized administration. This fundamental product direction provides support for managing more complex scenarios such as multi-office synchronization.

#2. End-User Administration

Look to the end user administration experience, it should provide a balance of control and enablement to the individual contributor while providing an equal balance of broad governance for IT. If we look to strike the perfect balance of end user empowerment and centralized control – Egnyte offers some interesting approaches. First, end users are enabled with the functionality one would expect  such as sharing via link or shared folder while expanding the use cases to include large file scenarios via FTP. On the flip side, administrators are able to centrally report on all users and enable corresponding permissions, monitor active & expired file links and most importantly generate complete audit trail of all file activities.

#3. File Sharing Permission Structure

Ensure the security limitations managed at the end user matches up with the scenarios for use as well as corporate and IT policies. Egnyte administrators have the ability to create multi-tiered users and control folder/sub-folder permissions, ensuring that files are only accessible by authorized users. Administrators can also customize the web interface to present consistent branding for employees, customers and business partners.

#4. Cloud vs. On-Prem

Consider how traditional file shares fit into the picture and how much of a gap will exist if this isn’t addressed as part of an overall mobility strategy. Egnyte blends the traditional file sharing workflow and cloud capabilities with a simple way of connecting on premise infrastructure with the Egnyte cloud environment. Multi-office and enterprise sites can be bidirectionally sync’d for backup to the cloud and provide access to files from anywhere, with any device as an example. The solution also offers multiple direct integration with traditional NAS devices and VMware virtualized architectures.

Using this four part checklist, organizations can begin to evaluate their file sharing needs and the shortfalls of existing legacy or consumer-based solutions.

To learn more about how Egnyte can help you deliver on collaboration and mobility, Softchoice and Egnyte are offering a complementary 30 minute cloud file sharing assessment  to help identify key areas of cost recovery available until December 30th, 2012. During the session, you’ll gain a clear picture on some of the most important areas to address first and understand other dependencies within your infrastructure that may support an immediate business case for mobility.

Originally from the Softchoice Cloud Blog, written by Richard Carson

Click here for original article

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