Hybrid Single Sign-On -- Sharing Your Cloud Files with Ease

May 23, 2011

Businesses share ideas, and without putting those ideas in a document and sharing with others, it is as if the idea never existed. The ability to safely share files and ideas with business partners and colleagues is essential to the success of a business.

But how do you safely and easily share files with others? Egnyte works to safely bring sharing into your work environment. With Egnyte, business people can control who can view their files and how they are viewed.

As Egnyte has grown from a small startup to the leading company delivering Cloud File Sharing for Business, we have increasingly relied on an ecosystem of partners and third-party solutions to ease integration with existing infrastructure. Customers use their platform of choice, from PC and Mac to the full range of handheld devices, to share and access files.

Integration with Salesforce.com and Outlook delivers a single secure repository with existing software applications, where users can access and share files at any time. Hybrid cloud implementations using NETGEAR and VMware platforms combine the performance of local storage with the flexibility of cloud access from any location. The choice of tools and options to incorporate Egnyte into current workflows minimizes the learning curve and speeds adoption.

Business customers are attracted to Egnyte by the rich set of features that provide the visibility and control IT managers need to confidently share and manage sensitive data.

Central management and visibility of access rights, group management tools and audit reports
Automatic synchronization of online and offline files for all platforms (mobile, desktop, NAS and virtual appliance)
Efficient set-up process that leverages existing user directories and mail systems
Reduced dependency on internal file servers, FTP servers and VPN

For our larger customers, we have delivered a seamless integration with existing on-premise single-sign-on solutions and directory services, such as Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP. These integrations allow administrators to manage all their users centrally and push those users' credentials to Egnyte.

Our pure cloud business customers have been able to take advantage of a number of pure Cloud SSO vendors who have delivered their integrations with Egnyte.

However, with a new class of Egnyte customers - those who fully take advantage of the combination of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, including hybrid cloud - a need has emerged to deliver a single point of entry and control for all apps. These include external cloud services like SaaS apps, emerging internal services like Private Cloud apps, as well as existing enterprise, web, Windows and legacy applications. Enter our newest partner, Citrix, and their vision of delivering unified access to these hybrid customers.

Since earlier this year Citrix has been actively working on delivering this vision to selected customers. They have integrated Egnyte as a core offering of Xen Desktop's OpenCloud Access, and will distribute an Egnyte application connector for the NetScaler Cloud Gateway.

With today's announcement, Citrix is laying out a roadmap for a single point of entry and control of all applications. We look forward to the full availability of NetScaler Cloud Gateway as an additional capability to ease integration with existing infrastructure and speed adoption of cloud among larger companies.

Filip Kesler, VP of Business Development at Egnyte