Cloud-Only File Sharing is More Risky than Skydiving

Some would say that you’d have to be crazy to seek thrills that involve falling to the ground faster than the speed of sound. But Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner did just that and proved the power of hope won over adversity - as well as gravity, the sound barrier and insurable risks.

While dropping through the clouds is definitely risky, this jump was completed by a former Special Forces soldier where the risks were mitigated by careful planning, great equipment, and a supporting team.

Taking risks with critical company data by storing it only in the cloud can be hazardous for your business. Just look at the recent news of the Microsoft’s SkyDrive outage that hit thousands of users worldwide. With employee salaries by far being the largest expense in a business, halting productivity by

employees not having access to business files due to the downtime impacts a business’ bottom line. In today’s business environment, downtime due to technology issues (especially ones out of your control) is unacceptable.

Beyond downtime, what about the security of your data? Dropbox, for example, has a track record of security breaches. If you wouldn’t want your private, personal information stored in the cloud, why would you leave your business-critical data at risk with consumer-grade cloud solutions?

With nearly half of Egnyte’s 30,000 customers using a cloud-only solution, I’m certainly not saying the cloud is bad. In fact, it’s an essential component to an effective IT ecosystem. Businesses need to take a strategic and secure approach to storage and file-sharing when adding cloud to the mix. By leveraging the security and performance of local storage and extending it to the unlimited capacity and flexibility of the cloud, customers can have the best of both worlds. By implementing a file-sharing solution where files can be shared from any on-premise storage device, any cloud storage, or by connecting any storage device to any cloud, organizations can maximize efficiency and take advantage of publicly available cloud services, while protecting critical data that is important to them and their customers.

For enterprises specifically, the cloud will never be enough if they want to ensure their data is truly secure. Some files will never go into the cloud for security reasons and other files need to be sent through the cloud to keep business running at top pace. When was the last time you tried to send a presentation deck via email, and it wouldn’t send due to its size? This type of scenario happens regularly, and the cloud can eliminate this problem, if it’s done through services that were built with enterprise needs in mind.

In truth, why take the risk with a cloud-only solution? The hybrid approach to file-sharing, one that leverages local storage, cloud storage, or both, reduces the risks of your file-sharing adventure by having the right equipment, planning, and team in place. Maybe cloud-only file sharing isn’t as risky as skydiving, but the risks certainly outweigh the reward.

*A version of this post originally appeared in Business Computing World.