Syncplicity adds Office 365 support, Egnyte launches data governance solution

Enterprise file sharing vendor Syncplicity  recently announced its software is now integrated with Microsoft Office 365, while competitor Egnyte rolled out its Egnyte Protect governance solution.

Syncplicty’s latest update includes at Microsoft Office Online capability so that users with an Office 365 account can view and edit documents directly from an online web browser. The company also added support for editing Office applications on their Android devices, along with a Syncplicity App Tab for in-use file notifications so that users are notified in real-time when files are being viewed, editing and saved.

A multi-folder sharing with security controls also has been added so IT administrators can control the sharing rights for files and folders. The Syncplicity application also now supports Microsoft Azure so that users can locate Syncplicity StorageVaults on the Azure public cloud.

“We now support that object-based storage model,” said Kevin de Smidt, Syncplicity’s vice president of products and marketing.”

Enterprise file sharing competitor Egnyte launched a hybrid data governance solution that allows users to control files stored collectively in Box, Dropbox, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive, Documentum and network attached servers (NAS). The Egnyte Protect data governance capability integrates with the public cloud and on-premise repositories.

Isabelle Guis, Egnyte’s chief marketing and strategy officer, said the Egnyte Protect is a uniform abstraction layer that connects to on-premise repositories. The governance capability gives IT administrators universal control over content.

“We make sure that policies and security features are enforced,” she said.

Egnyte customer Vimal Thomas, CIO at Yamaha, is a beta customer for Egnyte Protect. The company got rid of all their file servers and moved and moved all their Windows-based file server data into the enterprise file sharing Egnyte cloud last year. They had five file servers using direct-attached storage (DAS) that serviced 600 users.

“We had Windows file servers and we could not share files outside of Yamaha (and) there was no versioning,” Thomas said.

Thomas said they have their SharePoint on Egnyte Protect, giving them the ability to see who has access to sales data or the daily report on financials but also the control to make sure data is accessed by only a select group of people. All the data is encrypted and the data filtered to protect files that, for example, have social security numbers. Yamaha previously was a Dropbox customer for two years but they dropped the product last year.

“It was not enterprise-grade. It’s consumer-grade software,” Thomas said.