Take control of the cloud

February 16, 2012

Just like the “green initiative”, these days, a business does not look cool if it does not have some kind of strategy of “going to the cloud”. Is there too much hype about the cloud?The value proposition of converting your capex dollars to opex dollars, outsourcing what is critical and not core, do more with less (people or dollars) are some of the new age mantra’s. So, is going to the cloud is a no brainer? Not quite.Cloud should not be an all or nothing value proposition. Specific to Egnyte, you can certainly move all your files to our cloud and securely access and share them with pretty much any device. But, being in our cloud or in fact any other “public cloud” should not imply that you lose control of your data. Data that traditionally resided behind your firewall, that you could literally touch, now resides in the cloud. I can bet that compared to 99.99% of businesses who do it themselves, i.e. buy their own file server, do their own disaster recovery, have VPN for remote access, our security in terms of data encryption, data mirroring etc. is better. Yet, more than perception management, the reality is that if you are totally in the cloud, you have to deal with latency issues, and deal with the fact that if that remote office of yours lost internet connectivity you will have no access to your files. And in certain industries it is a compliance issue if you don't have your data readily available (on-premise or otherwise). The answer to all this is the control of the cloud. That is our core positioning and fundamental to our value proposition to our customers. We want to make sure that you can leverage the unlimited storage capability and ease of access of the cloud, combined with on-premise local data giving you fast, off-line access capability. It is in this direction that we continue to evolve the Egnyte product.