Chocolate and Peanut Butter

Yesterday we sent out a press release highlighting our momentum in two industries. 1,500 construction/engineering customers and 1,000 advertising/media customers are a proof-point of the value of a hybrid approach to file sharing. While most industries are adopting file sharing, these two industries are interesting as they share common needs where cloud-only file sharing solutions fall apart. Both industries have large files sizes that are getting bigger every year. Not only do these industries have to collaborate on these files across geographically separate offices, but they also require a solution that lets them do so securely with both their clients and partners.A hybrid approach to file sharing includes the use of both local storage and cloud storage. Local storage provides the fastest access speed possible, does not clog the connection to the Internet, and provides business continuity in case of Internet outage. Cloud provides accessibility to remote employees, business partners, and clients. What’s most interesting is that combining local storage plus cloud is not just additive, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – especially when it comes to construction/engineering and advertising/media companies.Having local storage in two office locations with the cloud in between enables teams in those geographically separated offices to work as though they are in the same room. Each team has fast local access to the local storage in their office while the cloud quickly and efficiently synchronizes project changes between the geographically separated local storage devices. It’s like having a 3000 mile LAN. Large media and engineering files further highlight the requirement for hybrid as cloud-only solutions simply cannot provide the performance these teams need to collaborate effectively on projects.I may be dating myself, but this reminds me of a Reese’s commercial where a person with peanut butter ran into a person with chocolate. They discovered that the combination of peanut butter and chocolate was much better than peanut butter or chocolate separately. This is the same phenomenon that happens when you combine local storage and cloud in file sharing.