To help companies take advantage of the cloud’s “rock bottom” pricing, Egnyte has extended its file sharing and synchronization capabilities to a host of third-party providers, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure and NetApp Storage GRID.
Customers who do the third-party cloud integration with the new EgnytePlus offering will use its interface to pull in a basic file structure while respecting all the rights and permissions the customer already has in place for its own internal infrastructure. CEO Vineet Jain said only when a file is requested does the data get pulled from the third-party cloud and passed to the user. All of the auditing and versioning features that are already available within Egnyte are maintained and available.
That essentially means a company can leverage the cheap cost of using a cloud service but according to all the policies it abides by for the files it keeps on its own servers.
Jain said in an email interview that Egnyte is not, nor has ever been, a cloud storage provider. It’s a market quickly becoming commoditized:
We can let the larger players play price wars. We’ve always been focused on how to add value for customers by providing the difficult software tier that ties together and enterprise’s file sharing and synchronization strategy. That means solutions around auditing, versioning, permissions structures, large scale deployments, mobility and speed. These are difficult problems, and that’s where we add true value to the equation.
Egnyte has traditionally worked with companies to synchronize its multiple network attached storage (NAS) and storage attached networks (SANs) so users can have a single place where they access files. By adding cloud services, customers have a number of ways to be more efficient, cost-effective and even strategic:
It may be that they want to take advantage of the multiple geographies that these providers work within to locate their data as close as possible to their workers and offices. It may be that they simply want to take advantage of the ever dropping prices these providers are offering for storage. It may be part of a larger package for cloud compute power, and they’re using storage as a leverage for getting better services from that provider.
The cloud price wars give services like AWS a way to scale their business. It also opens the gateways for enterprise customers to store data in a more efficient manner. Egnyte is not a storage provider, but it will increasingly compete with companies like Carbonite, which also see the opportunity in serving as a file-syncing provider between cloud services and business customers.