tired fools

if you do a google search for enterprise cloud file server solutions, you’ll see Egnyte all over the first page of results. you won’t see much else. it appears as though there is a massive gap in the market here. there are personal back-up solutions and file-sharing sites aimed at very small numbers of users, but nothing enterprise class. and there should be.

so what about egnyte? well it looks pretty good. it has a bunch of nice features, like versioning, excellent permissioning, local caching, change notifications, and in other respects it’s a regular store of files familiar to most users. and it’s well priced.

egnyte is a young company and no one else is doing this. they’re as helpful as could be, but they don’t have all the answers yet. here are the bigger issues:

Egnyte provides secure access to your files using a web browser, and additionally, from a mapped drive on your desktop. You can drag and drop files, edit documents in Egnyte using My Computer on Windows or Finder on a Mac.

for any enterprise user, the ability to open a document and save it to a mapped drive is crucial. you can’t do this here. drag and drop requires a user to save a document to a local drive then copy it across. it’s inconvenient, it encourages bad habits. it’s worse than the user had before. it’s unacceptable. egnyte should have a client that makes this possible. it doesn’t. luckily you can go out and buy webdrive. this does the job, but at half the cost again of using egnyte.

Egnyte Local Cloud is an always available local
cache of files from the On Demand File Server.
The Egnyte Local Cloud solution provides
the following capabilities:

* Off-line access to the files
* Work faster with large files
* Local copy of your files

this sounds perfect, but might not be all it seems. it appears to be only available for caching on an individual user basis at the moment. more is promised soon.

who are they? how long are they going to be around? Egnyte is a start up that was self-funded until late last year when they raised an undisclosed sum, according to venturebeat:

The funding was led by Maples Investments, with participation from retired serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. Although Jain wouldn’t say how large the round was, he did mention that it was “substantially less” than the $7 million first round he raised for his previous company, Kleiner Perkins-backed Valdero.

Egnyte is in the US, there is currently no EU cloud. This presents a problem for EU companies because of EU legislation on data protection. Basically any data you have that refers to an individual, even an email address, or anything that could identify an individual, seems to invoke this legislation. Cross-border data flow is covered. There are five countries that get a free pass. The US is a sixth, except that it’s subject to the US-based party signing up to the EU-US scheme (i don’t have the name right now, maybe update later). I found no evidence that Egnyte has done this, but I shall ask. Given this lack of evidence, you are then required to have a contract that encapsulates certain key aspects of data-protection. egnyte’s security and privacy policy does seem to qualify. however, it might take a legal opinion before many regulated businesses would risk it.

Egnyte looks good. it looks like the issues can be solved with some work. in a few months they may be a much better proposition. others are sure to follow.