Salman UI Haq| Cloudtweaks
Cloud storage is getting saturated, fast. How many of you use just a single, or maybe two Cloud storage services? Yes, I know. None. We all have our data flying around the Cloud.
While only a few Cloud sync and storage services are positioned to become clear winners in this game, the landscape on the enterprise side is witnessing increased thirst for faster and simpler ways to store, sync and collaborate on enterprise data stored on the Cloud, be it private or public.
Egnyte – an enterprise Cloud data storage, sync and collaboration company – last month released benchmarks which show that they can sync data at top speed, taking about 7 minutes to sync a 500GB file, whereas (according to their findings), their competitors (unnamed) take about 72 hours, on average. That’s a huge difference. At the core of this speed gain is their “delta sync” technology, which makes sure that only the updated portions of the file are sent over the network to sync with the full version of file on the Cloud. This is something similar to what Dropbox does, making file sync incredibly fast. Egnyte has been doing it since 2007, when they started out.
So does speed matter for an enterprise worker who normally has to work on documents or spreadsheets or presentations which are a few MBs at best? Perhaps not if you do not think at a scale – imagine 100 users working on multiple files daily. That would be taxing for the network if you start putting complete files over it even if just a line was changed or a cell value in Excel was updated.
Unless your enterprise has fully adopted consumer Cloud sync and storage solutions like Dropbox or gone Box, there’s a good chance that if you’re using a Cloud only solution for file storage, sync and collaboration, your network would be throttled and you may be paying additional dollars (Egnyte estimated that to be $6,000/month to acquire additional 420Mbps/mo.) to keep up with all the “data traffic” put on the network.
So when you hand over your data to a Cloud data storage provider, who takes care of its security? Security is one of the top concerns when it comes to convincing enterprises to make the shift to Cloud, especially after the recent data breach and massive intrusion incidents which have only helped to increase awareness and educate about security threats which modern enterprises dace. Egnyte has a unique solution; they let you hold the encryption keys yourself which means that you will have complete access to your data. The data is encrypted when it’s put on the line (data in motion) and it is stored in encrypted form, something which Google Cloud only recently started doing. Perhaps data-at-rest encryption is becoming the de-facto standard for Cloud storage.
Egnyte claims to process over a billion files every day. This is a mammoth number and saving even a small amount of network bandwidth and time to sync a file would have a significant impact when you look at the big picture. Cloud storage is all about increased productivity, reduced complexity and cost savings and if you’re not getting all of these from your Cloud storage provider, you are actually missing out.
