As companies strive toward local/private clouds for their collaboration needs, defining storage remains one of the major obstacles to overcome. Simply put, storage remains complex to deploy, manage and secure in the world of the local cloud. Ironically, local (or private) cloud solutions are supposed to make storage easier to manage and use.
Cloud services vendor Egnyte is attempting to take the mystery out of cloud storage in all of its forms (local, private, hybrid and hosted) by making storage easier to provision, manage and secure. Case in point is Egnyte’s Personal Local Cloud 6.0, a storage service that falls outside of normal definitions.
Personal Local Cloud 6.0 falls under Egnyte’s Local Cloud Branding, which includes the Personal Local Cloud, Office Local Cloud and Enterprise Local Cloud. All of those offerings are very similar, but are different in scalability, user counts and capacity. Nevertheless, all three share one thing in common: They are based upon a hybrid storage infrastructure, where files are stored locally and replicated in the cloud.
At first blush, that seems to bring some confusion to where files are stored and how they are managed, and that confusion tends to make it difficult for end users to grasp the concept of how to access and share files. That, in turn, can lead to more tech support calls and drive help desk costs up. Engyte tries to avoid the confusion by simplifying how files are accessed and shared, using familiar folder and drive letter paradigms. Nevertheless, smaller offices tend to desire simpler solutions, and that is where Egnyte’s latest enhancement to Personal Local Cloud 6.0 comes into play. That enhancement is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.
Michael Semmen, partner, ZUM LLC, an Egnyte customer, lauds the additional capability: "Egnyte allows our global team to share and access 3-D multimedia files 24-by-7, which maximizes efficiency of our production process. I am excited to see Egnyte continue to enhance features. The Outlook plug-in fits in with the way our users want to work."
