Ask An Expert

File sharing enables collaborative work on documents such as contracts, presentations, proposals, drawings, designs and so forth. Multiple people can contribute to the content, review, approve, sign, and print.

Usually people do this by exchanging the docs via e-mail. The challenge is keeping up with the revisions, collating between multiple e-mails, and sequencing to identify the latest version. The flood of back and forth communication can result in vital edits being missed. With a hybrid solution, like Egnyte, one can work on the docs and sync up with the cloud. The cloud maintains the revisions — of course it cannot resolve edits — but it can maintain a temporal ordering. Additionally, it also maintains an archive once the edits are completed and the work is signed off.

Is online music storage different than online file storage?

Online music storage can be in two forms:

1. A hybrid cloud provides a place to store music files, as well as sync local copies between multiple devices. One can then play the music using normal players like iTunes, Windows Media player and so forth. This is a very good option, as you have full freedom to choose the player; moreover the music files are local and yet can leverage the storage cloud to share between devices.
2. A newer form is the so-called music cloud where the music is stored in cloud storage and streamed to the device for playing. In many ways it is a music streaming service, but for music that you buy and own. Of course, one needs constant connectivity to play the music (some music clouds have caching capability) and also one needs to use the player from the cloud provider.

Apple iTunes, Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Music are the leading music clouds. Spotify is a cloud streaming service and belongs to the category of a cloud locker, but also can be considered a music cloud.