Last year I wrote Your Storage In the Cloud as a baseline article of what Cloud Storage. Later, at E2EVC Conference in Copenhagen I gave a presentation “Cloud Storage and What is the problem?”. In the end we want to share content, that’s the ultimate goal. A secondary goal could be data protection if local fails. But let’s focus on that first goal;
Sharing Content
The Business
In a corporate environment we have file-servers. They have trees and woods and rainforests of folders and you can access and share your files from anywhere … within the corporate vicinity. Or with the magical powers of VPN. Well … NO, that’s not going to make it in this mobile world of always on always connected.
The second type of content sharing are the so called collaboration platforms. We won’t name names here but you all know what we are talking about. Checking in, checking out, versioning, web-based platforms, complete stack integration, … in short; everything the business wishes for to us have.
The User
The user however choose different! Shadow IT has become a major threat to rusty IT teams that cannot cope with the demand of their consumer-oriented users. These are the people that download apps to do their business faster than any change in the corporate IT could ever happen. This is what made Amazon Web Services so big so fast. You initiate new servers in minutes by the magic of a credit card. It proves that business departments are willing to pay for faster go-2-market.
In come the public services for easy file sharing. For me it started with YouSendIt.com – how easy can it sound? Files too big or they need to go to someone out of the company? YouSendIt could put 100Mb files in the cloud and you simply need to share the public (unique) URL where the receiver can download it. Next step; APPS! Syncing a file is ok, but it’s not collaboration. By syncing FOLDERS you can easily collaborate with anyone in the world without the hassle of the corporate IT department. Dropbox, iCloud, Skydrive, … we are all using it and IT doesn’t know.
Oxygen odrive
Those public services have some challenges. First of all it’s syncing what you have on your local machine to a location in the cloud. This means that the primary location is still your local drive and the size of the all the data you can use is used to it’s fully extend on your device. Secondly, that information is stored in public services which is for a lot of corporate environments just a simple NO-GO from a compliancy perspective.
Oxygen Cloud, known for LeapFile (a corporate solution for YouSendIt) and their existing cloud storage services just released their newest baby: odrive. odrive is that ENDUSER ORIENTED sync-n-share folder for the enterprise. It works as an object based gateway for existing file servers. Now you will be able to remotely work on your shared files without the need of syncing all folders to your local device. I strongly urge you to review the demonstration we had a few weeks ago at Storage Field Day 4.
Private Beta
A private beta has been made available and I have it running at home. If you want more information or test it out with me, give me a ping. I have set it up in just a few minutes and was sharing my content over the web between all my devices without the need of an external server and without the need of storing all that data on all devices!
Disclaimer: OxygenCloud was a presenter at Storage Field Day 4 in which I was invited as an attendee. There is no personal compensation involved other than transportation and lodging, nor is anyone obliged to write anything at all.