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Do you know how many of your
employees are using public cloud
‘sync and share’ services? Despite
many IT leaders’ best intentions, they
remain a popular way to share and
collaborate within the enterprise. Yet
the truth is that these services are
not only bad for your business but are
failing commercially. So what happens
if or when they start to disappear,
taking your corporate data with
them? Do you have an exit strategy?
Papering over the cracks
Watch the glossy marketing campaigns
promoted by these public cloud file
share providers and you’d be forgiven for
thinking that business is booming. The
likes of Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive,
Box, Microsoft OneDrive and others all
talk a good game. And they’re certainly
popular in the enterprise, amongst staff
looking to circumvent inflexible, non-
user friendly corporate storage systems.
But they represent just 1% of the total
income of the enterprise storage market.
Annual revenue of $500 million
might sound like a lot on paper but it
pales in comparison with the $50 billion
made every year by hardware giants
like EMC, NetApp and HP. The problem
is that most users of these cloud
services – around 97% in fact – don’t
actually pay, turning the whole industry
into a financial black hole for the
providers.What’s more, while traditional
enterprise storage continues to grow at
around 10% annually, the cloud players
show little signs of making the gains
they so desperately need to recoup their
massive investments.
A recent regulatory filing by Box
showing losses of $168m on just $124m
in revenue highlights the unpalatable
truth: these services cost more to
run than they make. Even cloud giant
Amazon has lost an estimated $2bn
over the last four quarters, according to
analyst Canalys.
Although many of these cloud-
based file sync and share services are
bank-rolled by large technology firms,
what happens when the board finally
says ‘enough is enough’ and pulls the
plug on their loss-making divisions?
What happens to all that corporate data
residing on servers outside the company?
Do you have a back-up plan?
Heads in the sand
A new study commissioned by
Connected Data finds that 19% of UK IT
leaders have no idea how quickly they
could get their data back or migrate it
to another provider in such an event.
This is particularly worrying considering
that even a day or two without mission
critical data could have a serious knock-
on effect on an organisation.What’s
more, a quarter (26%) say they don’t
know how much that process would cost
them, although 18% suspect the figure
would be over £25,000.
It’s not just the costs and operational
impact at stake, but also the potential
repercussions on compliance. More than
one in ten (12%) respondents claim they
don’t even know where their public cloud
provider stores their data. Failing to meet
such requirements could lead to strict
penalties and reputational damage.
These figures, of course, wouldn’t
be so worrying if very little corporate
data ended up being stored on public
cloud-based file share platforms. But
it is. Hundreds of millions of corporate
users globally set up accounts, either
unaware of, or in deliberate defiance of,
official IT departments. A recent study by
Connected Data revealed that 69% of IT
leaders believe their staff are using such
services regardless of policy.
It’s an obvious reaction to what
are often seen by users as monolithic,
unintuitive enterprise storage systems.
So what’s to be done?
Plan for the future
First, IT leaders need to accept the need
Don’t wait for the ‘Sync
‘n Share’ bubble to burst
advises Geraldine Osman
Beware the bubble
for employees to share and collaborate.
It’s one of the key enablers of a
productive, efficient and agile workforce.
Then it’s all about finding alternative file
sync and share systems that can support
these new ways of working – tiering
the approach according to what data
needs to be shared and what needs to be
stored. These systems should combine
the best features of cloud services –
flexibility and intuitive UIs – with the
control and security of in-house systems.
In short, you’re looking for a private
cloud service which can save costs
by sitting on top of existing in-house
infrastructure, but offer options such
as file sharing via links, mobile device
support and file synchronisation.With
100% data privacy guaranteed and
complete IT department oversight,
there’s simply no exit strategy required.
Geraldine Osman is VP International
Marketing at Connected Data, the
creator of Transporter, the world’s first
peer-to-peer private storage appliance.
Transporter allows customers to privately
share and protect data at a fraction of
the cost of fee-based cloud services. The
Connected Data team consists of the
same professionals responsible for the
Drobo storage array and the creation of
the high performance BlueArc Silicon
Server.
19% of UK IT
leaders have
no idea how
quickly they
could get their
data back
or migrate
it to another
provider.
Dat’s the way to do it
Concerned about the security risks of staff and
students using personal cloud-based storage to store
and share sensitive data, The University of Liverpool is
offering a secure, productive alternative in the form of
an enterprise file sync and share solution fromVaronis
Systems.
It has also introduced a policy stating that ‘confidential
documents are not to be stored on other platforms.’
University of Liverpool systems manager AndyWilliams
said: “We faced the challenge of users moving data online to
file sharing services. In addition to the data being vulnerable
off-site, concerns of document version control needed to
be addressed, plus the complication that when people leave
the university, it is virtually impossible to retain or even
revoke access to data stored in uncontrolled repositories.”
Varonis DatAnywhere gives 32,000 students and 4,700
staff the flexibility to sync University file-share data across
all of their devices and share files securely with external
collaborators.
Users can access file storage, including personal (home
folders) and shared departmental drives, from different
locations and devices, such as mobiles, tablets and
computers, with the definitive file copy always residing on
the university’s file shares.
Just one week after implementation, 1,366 faculty
members and students had signed up to secure cloud-
based sharing with DatAnywhere.
