Happy Monday!

Happy Monday and I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend! I enjoyed spending time in the sun and attempted to begin reading "The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James, so wish me luck! I also had time to think about the TechCrunch Disrupt event I attended last week. I enjoyed meeting and exchanging ideas with current Egnyte customers and potential customers. One question I was asked on numerous occasions was "What is the difference between Egnyte and Dropbox?" In case you have been wondering the same thing, I am going to address the question below.Desktop Centric (Dropbox) vs. Server Centric (Egnyte)Egnyte and Dropbox are two applications that provide online storage and sharing. While there are some similarities, there are significant differences between the two applications.

Basic Architecture

The primary difference is based on the fact that Dropbox is built with an individual user in mind. This means that each user signs up for their own Dropbox account and they can decide how to share files between each other.

Egnyte is built with a business and central administration in mind. A business can sign up for their own custom subdomain (e.g. https://acmecorp.egnyte.com/) with Egnyte and centrally manage all aspects of file storage and sharing.

This includes (but is not limited to) setting up a company wide shared folder scheme (e.g. folders for Marketing, folders for Sales, etc.), setting up user accounts for employees and business partners (Egnyte provides different user types to support this) and importantly, assigning granular permissions on folders (e.g. read only, read/write, read/write/delete). This allows a company to ensure that users see only files they are authorized to see and also set controls on their ability to view or modify files. The account administrator can also control all user passwords.

Uploads and File Access

With Dropbox, files can be loaded one by one or viewed from a web browser or using a desktop sync tool. Dropbox offers an easy to use right click ability on desktop files, allowing users to share a folder in their Dropbox account, view previous file versions, view the file on the Dropbox website, or share the file via a URL.

Apart from web browser access, Egnyte also allows access to the cloud using a mapped drive letter (like a Z:) on your computer. This is great for direct, live editing of files in the cloud. For really large data sets, Egnyte can also support uploads using an FTP protocol. Best of all, Egnyte also provides a desktop sync tool, called a Personal Local Cloud, like Dropbox.

Many of our larger customers really like the idea of working from a local file share in their office. The idea is to have an entire office or team of say 50 users access files quickly from a common shared server in the office. To serve this need, Egnyte provides products called the Office Local Cloud and Enterprise Local Cloud which can be deployed on either a NAS device or an existing server. This is a very unique product that Egnyte offers. Neither Dropbox nor anyone else in the market offers a product like this.

Both Egnyte and Dropbox provide mobile applications, making it easy and convenient to access files on the go.

Other Features

As a business centric service, Egnyte offers features such as computer backup, auditing, reporting and integration with existing business investments like Microsoft Active Directory. Egnyte also provides branding features, where a company can customize the look and feel of their account to meet their needs, including integrating with your own email system.

Even though both services provide cloud storage, there are significant differences between the two which should be taken into account when determining which service is the best solution for you. Thank you and please let me know if you have any other questions. Have an absolutely fantastic day!