Enterprise File Fabric™
As remote working settles into becoming more and more of a reality for many companies our experience is that many companies wish to facilitate direct end user access to Amazon’s Simple Object Storage, Amazon S3.
The reasons they want to do this are:
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Interest in letting employees to work from home has never been higher and will remain high even after the Covid-19 virus has run its course. For Companies large and small the key challenge is how to make Company data available remotely in a way that is easy for employees to use without compromising on information security. The Enterprise File Fabric™ offers an unmatched set of features to support secure remote working. In this post we’ll see how to set up the File Fabric in less than an hour to provide secure remote access to on-premises data, be that SMB, NAS / SAN or Microsoft DFS shares. The best part is that data is not copied or removed anywhere, it remains in the same secure place and the File Fabric provides web scale secure access to it .
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One of the things the Coronavirus Covid-19 has brought sharply into focus is the topic of employee remote working. Whether this is to limit the spread of the virus or because employees are self isolating, many companies may find themselves in a position where a significant part of their workforce is working out of the office.
The aim of this post is to outline how the File Fabric software may help companies who wish to prepare or facilitate remote working.
Firstly some background on the File Fabric. The File Fabric is a secure multi-cloud content management data collaboration solution. It does not provide any storage rather it indexes and works with existing on-premise or on-cloud storage silos. It unites files in these disparate storage platforms to provide a single cohesive way for people to securely work and collaborate.
The File Fabric has a strong ethos and governance and compliance of the data that it indexes and makes available providing event based audit and configurable compliance policies.
There are three ways to use the File Fabric today:
1. For small businesses from our SaaS hosted platform. This version of the File Fabric does not have all of the features of the enterprise version.
2. Enterprise Version that is self hosted by a company and can be deployable on-premises or on-cloud.
3. For free using our self hosted personal version.
Let’s take a looks at some of the challenges and solutions that may be faced by remote workers and how the File Fabric solves them.
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One of the key, powerful features of the Enterprise File Fabric is the ability for teams to simply and easy share and collaborate on files for the projects they are working on together, whatever the underlying local or cloud storage. This can easily be teams that are located in the same building, within the same continent or even across the planet from one another. The best part is that while the File Fabric can power this collaboration within an organization, it can also bridge the gap and securely allow teams across companies work on the same documents.
In this post, we’ll take a look at Shared Team Folders, allowing intra-organizational teams to work on the same file sets. Future posts will look at link and folder sharing, when you need to collaborate inter-organizationally.
Continue reading “Multi-Cloud Shared Team Folder Document Collaboration”
by Rackspace® Cloud Files provides fast, scaleable and cost-effective object storage for applications, but it isn’t easily accessible for end users. Which is why Storage Made Easy® has released their Cloud Drive for Rackspace.
Continue reading “Storage Made Easy Drive for Rackspace Cloud Files”
by Slack is a cloud-based collaboration tool which many teams and organisations already use as a collaboration hub. The File Fabric is a ‘single pane of glass’ fo unstructured file data, be that on-clodu or on-premises and it makes using, sharing, and accessing these files ultra secure. The File Fabric Slack connector brings together the best collaboration hub with the best File hub !
Continue reading “Share Files Securely Using Slack and the Enterprise File Fabric”
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This post is about a file sharing compliance feature that we are referring to as two-factor file sharing.
The way this works is as follows:
Continue reading “Introducing two-factor file sharing for any storage with Twilio”
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My name is Giada and I am Sales Director for Storage Made Easy.
One of the principles of the company is to work with the clients, understand their business and build a product that satisfy their needs by enhancing a feature-rich interface. File locking is one of the most needed by organizations in today’s business environment. Users are constantly working on the same document and a restriction to file access is sometimes mandatory.
Continue reading “My Favourite Feature: File Locking”
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This blog post is a technical post outlining the steps needed to deploy the Storage Made Easy Cloud Control Gateway and Enterprise File Share and Sync solution on the Azure IaaS compute infrastructure.
Storage Made Easy provides a private enterprise file share and sync solution that can not only be used with Azure Blob Storage Data but which can also be used as a cloud security point to secure other storage points or sync and share solutions, such as Office365 and SharePoint. We call this Cloud Control and you can read more about it here.
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Storage Made Easy has been involved with OpenStack from the beginning. We were one of the early OpenStack company foundation members and our whole service has worked with OpenStack from the very beginning.
Storage Made Easy already supports OpenStack on Mac, Windows, Linux desktop’s and on iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android for our Cloud File Server Platform. Today we are please to announce another App for OpenStack. This time it is a stand-alone Android App that works independent of the SME Server and works solely against the OpenStack platform. It is available on the Google Play Store and is free for personal use and licensable for companies or ISP’s.
Unlike other Apps that have been release the App focuses on the Object Storage piece of OpenStack, Swift. It features:
– Add multiple OpenStack Swift Servers
– Upload, download , delete, rename, copy, move files / folders and create new folders
– Sort files by name, date or size
– View downloaded files with associated Apps
– Built in streamer for music and video files
– Thumbnail view of picture on local files prior to upload so no need to open.
– Email local files as attachments and web files as URL’s
– Add pin lock to lock app
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1. Unknown sensitive company information leaked
Not knowing what potentially sensitive company information is being shared can have a big effect on your Company. Sharing sensitive product designs, customer information, financial information etc can have a direct negative effect that may not be seen but will be felt.
Storage Made Easy provides policies that operate above all private and cloud data and enables policies to be set that incorporate time expiry and password protections inclusive of audit tracking and GEO location restrictions.
2. Data Breach
There is an increasing amount of privacy legislation that a company has to adhere to, such as HIPPA, FIPS, European privacy legislation. Not controlling the flow of information can result in severe financial penalties, or worse, jail.
3. Sensitive data on non company data services
The rise of Bring your Own Cloud within companies can result in corporate data being stored on unsecure services that can be breached and are outside of the control of corporate IT.
With Storage Made Easy on-site Cloud Control Appliance companies have a universal policy control gateway which can be used to control access to Bring your Own Cloud environment such as DropBox. This includes browser, mobile or API access to such services. This gives enterprises a single platform to securely manage and protect file sharing by centrally enforcing corporate policy on Bring Your Own Cloud data flows.
4. Slow Network / Reduced Quality of Service
Users tend to share files in companies. Once the file is shared it can be forward by the recipient anywhere. This touches upon point 1 of uncontrolled file sharing. Users should be sharing links not files so they can be tracked and controlled. There is another benefit of this which is to do with the network congestion that occurs inside of companies and this network congestion.
Lots of people sharing similar large files can lead to network congestion inside of a company which can not only be costly to productivity, it can be costly to the company as more bandwidth is consumed. Link Sharing shifts the bandwidth for the file download to the remote user.
Storage Made Easy provides add-in’s for Microsoft Outlook and Mac Mail that promote such links sharing inside of enterprises.
5. Copyright infringement
It is not unusual for users inside of companies to use their corporate emails to share digital music and digital books with friends. This not only exposes the user to copyright infringement it also exposes the company and with no control it is silent threat that explode at any time.
The key take-away is that uncontrolled file sharing can be bad for business and companies should give serious to consideration to how the promote governed file sharing that does not just work on one data cloud but works against all public / private data clouds that is in use at a company.
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Most cloud storage plans that offer team pricing do so on a monthly basis using the typical SaaS pricing model where the simple calculation is:
No of Users * Monthly Price
Storage Made Easy also offers this plan but we realised when talking with customer that many companies would prefer to have the option of an alternative of what they term “perpetual” licensing.
This is the “old” software model in which licenses were procured on a one-time pricing “capex” basis and the only recurring costs was a monthly recurring “open” support and maintenance cost.
After numerous requests for such pricing for our online hosted team service we thought why not ? We can surely construct a model that works for companies who want a pricing model where the majority of the costs is up front in capex and the longer you use the service the more money you save.
Support enables access to SME support and Maintenance enables access to future product versions and this payment is mandatory for continued use of the service.
Support and maintenance is 22% of the initial purchase in year 2 and then year 3 and the thereon.
So how do we calculate this ? The algorithm used to calculate this yearly pricing for business team users is simply:
No users * $5 (monthly Price) * 12 (industry average customer churn)
This results in companies who use the service for longer than 12 months effectively using it for free thereafter other than the one time recurring annual 20% payment for support & maintenance.
Now lets look at some practical examples
Company with 15 users:
SaaS Cumulative Spend
12 Months 24 Months 36 months
$900 $1800 $2700
Initial Payment (15*$5) = $75
Monthly Payment thereafter $75
Lifetime Cumulative Spend
12 Months 24 Months 36 months
$900 $1098 $1296
Initial Payment (15*$5*12) = $900
Monthly Payment thereafter $0
Yearly Payment thereafter $198
Savings over 3 Year period
1 Year savings = 0
2 Year savings = $702
3 Year Savings = $1404
Savings go up the longer the time period and the more users deployed !
Are there any differences between the accounts ?
There is only one difference.
In the SaaS service each users gets access to 10GB storage per user (hosted on Amazon S3)
In the Lifetime service each user gets access to 5Gb storage per user (hosted on Amazon S3)
In each case the cumulative storage for all users can be used as a ‘pool’ and spread between users as per the Administrator quota policy.
Also each Company can add additional storage or services from any of the 40+ clouds that SME supports.
Features also included for The team service also includes in both lifetime and SaaS pricing options:
More details on features can be found on the SME features page.
All pricing information is on the SME Pricing page.
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