Egnyte HybridCloud review

Most cloud synchronisation applications are based on the simple premise that local storage is uploaded to the cloud and synchronised automatically across multiple devices and computers. Some products, including Dropbox and Trend Micro SafeSync, have taken the idea a little further and added the ability to create some shared storage space for collaboration, but that's about as close to business use as they get.

Egnyte has a slightly different approach with its service, which it calls HybridCloud. The key difference is that it provides multiple methods for working with online storage, including traditional synchronisation and a rather clever file server service. From this it's clear to see that the service has been built for business use from the start.

The Egnyte web interface.

This is immediately obvious in the way that you buy the service, with the online storage space shared across every single user, rather than each user having a fixed amount of space. It makes sense to manage business storage as a single lump, particular as some users will use more storage space than others. It also removes any problems over shared storage and whose quota it eats in to. This is true no matter how much storage you buy, from the entry-level 150GB for small businesses all the way up to 16TB and beyond for large enterprises.

While this is a fairly simple change from some of the other services we've seen, the big change comes in the way that this storage space can be used thanks to two different types of accounts - Power Users and Standard Users. Each package comes with a set of Power Users, although you can buy more as you need them, with large enterprises paying $7.60 per extra user, while Standard Users are free and come in sufficient volumes for most organisations (600 for Medium and Large Organizations).