CEO Reflections

Is Enterprise Cloud Storage dead on arrival?Almost every week, I hear someone questioning the wisdom of going to the cloud. The biggest issue pointed out is lack of security or rather "perceived" lack of security. I can certainly say that this is not true, but then missteps occur like that of Dropbox, one of the most popular file syncing/sharing solutions for consumers. For a few hours you could access any account by just entering the username without a password,  and this shakes the faith of the staunchest cloud supporters. It is all too easy to have a feeling of Schadenfreude in this situation, but frankly events like these are rare. In fact, the security architecture and technologies of cloud service providers are far superior compared to most in-house efforts.Certainly the "cloud" is the latest buzzword and will eventually be replaced by something new. This is no different than buzzwords of yesteryears like "b2b," "web 2.0," "consumer internet," etc. What will remain is the remarkable value proposition of the cloud based solutions. If the fundamental concern of "I am not losing control" of my data is addressed adequately along with actual (not perceived) latency issues of accessing data in the cloud, I see no reason why solutions like ours will not be widely adopted.Numerous research studies are indicating that adoption of cloud storage is higher in the SME market than large enterprises. It's not that the SME's care less about security, but they certainly have less legacy investments in hardware/data centers to deal with. Interestingly, at Egnyte, we are seeing a gradual seepage into large enterprises not as a rogue solution that users love and IT hates, but rather as a solution that users love and IT can centrally administer and control. This facet of central administration and control is fundamental to the security requirements of businesses, other than network/access security and encryption.With the increasingly rapid adoption of cloud storage solutions in the small to mid market and some in the enterprise, I can say with conviction that if done right, cloud storage's longevity is not in any doubt.