Fueling Business Growth With a Seamless Google Cloud migration

In today’s hybrid office environments, it can be difficult to know where your most valuable and sensitive content is, who’s accessing it, and how people are using it. That’s why Egnyte focuses on making it simple for IT teams to manage and control a full spectrum of content risks, from accidental data deletion to privacy compliance.

I used to be an Egnyte customer before joining the team, so I’ve experienced firsthand the transformative effects that Egnyte can have on a company. Because data is fundamental to a company’s success, we take the trust of our 22,000+ customers very seriously. There is no room for error with a cloud governance platform, which means that the technology providers we work with can’t fail either. That’s why we work with Google Cloud.

Since Egnyte was founded in 2007, we have delivered our services to customers 24/7. We do this by running our own data centers: two in the USA and one in Europe. However,  as the company continued its steady growth, owning and managing these data centers became unsustainable. Managing everything required for a data center involves a tremendous amount of work. Not only were we constantly building, maintaining, and paying for all this infrastructure, but we’d have to constantly expand our data centers to accommodate our business growth. This caused a never-ending pipeline issue because we had to predict how many businesses we were going to win over the next 12 to 18 months. What if we planned to grow the business by 20%, and end up growing by 25% instead? 

We knew that being limited to our own data centers was going to negatively impact our business, so we looked for alternatives. To gain scalability and introduce another layer of reliability to our business, we decided to collaborate with a reputable cloud provider who could reliably back-up our data. We examined the offerings of every cloud provider and found that in every category that we analyzed, Google was hands down the winner.

One of these categories is the reach of the network. With its own transoceanic fiber with points of presence in all markets where we’re currently doing business as well as markets where we intend to do business one day, Google’s network is second to none. Another important criterion for us was flexibility in the product offering, so we could better consider the financial risks of this large-scale data migration. For a while, we needed to pay for both our new cloud infrastructure and our old on-premises one, as they overlapped during the migration, but Google Cloud made it easier for us to plan for this.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to take advantage of what Google Cloud has to offer. Our migration has impacted not only our business but also our customers. We can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our customers - whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud or any app, anywhere in the world. We look forward to seeing what’s next.

By December 2021, we had completed our full migration to Google Cloud. This significant migration was completed gradually and without disrupting our services at any point in time. Our close collaboration with the Google Cloud team is one of the big reasons we completed this so successfully. Google Cloud was able to anticipate some of the problems we’d likely face and helped us overcome them along the way. 

We were able to shut off our last data center in February 2022, and the beneficial changes to the business are already obvious. Capacity planning, which used to be our biggest challenge on-premises, is now a problem of the past. The ability to spin up new resources on Google Cloud means we no longer need to buy additional resources a year in advance and wait for them to be shipped. 

Using Google Cloud means that we no longer rely on aging infrastructure, which is a very limiting factor when you’re developing and engineering a platform as complex as Egnyte. Our entire platform is now always operating on the latest storage, processing, network, and services available on Google Cloud.

Additionally, we have services embedded in our infrastructure such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Memorystore for Redis, which means we no longer need to build services from scratch or shop, install, and build them into the product and company workflow. There’s a long list of Google Cloud services that have significantly simplified our processes and now support our flagship products, Egnyte Collaborate and Protect (Secure and Govern).

Looking ahead, we will continue to take advantage of what Google Cloud has to offer. Our migration has impacted not only our business but also our customers. We can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our customers whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud or any app, anywhere in the world. We look forward to seeing what’s next.