Summary Egnyte was established on the principle of ‘Provisioning of Revolutionary Data Services’ and has successfully achieved that. It offers solutions for complicated data requirements of SMBs and large enterprises made possible through a popular service format that offers simplicity, security, cost efficiency, and top performance. Egnyte continuously exists in the press and media limelight due to its exciting services and attractive plans.
Introduction
Egnyte Company was established by a high-profile team of managers, entrepreneurs, and technology geeks who excelled in their respective fields. Among them was co-founder and CEO Mr. Vineet Jain, who along with his team established the company to provide industry-leading services to SMBs and large enterprises. He envisioned changing the way data is shared and stored within online business management.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, they successfully established the company and devised world-class service of data backup and file sharing among employees, offices, business partners and other stakeholders. Since the establishment of Egnyte in 2008, it has become one of the most favorite data solution companies in the world. It possesses a strong management and technical team with vision and decades of technical expertise in various fields of information technology.
Egnyte provides quality technical solutions for data backup and sharing problems, as well as attractive price plans for a variety of market segments.
Plans & Pricing
Pricing options encompass the basic needs of most customers, including home users, and small to very large businesses.
Egnyte offers three major service plans. Group and Office plans are considered Small business subcategorizes, and Enterprise is the company’s Large business plan. The details of these plans are given below:
Group @ 24.99 USD/Month: 150GB online storage, 5 employees/users license, 1GB max file upload.
Office @ 44.99 USD/Month: 1TB online storage, 10 employees/users license, 2.5GB max file upload, FTP access.
Enterprise @ 12.99 USD/User/Month: 3TB online storage, unlimited employees/users (min-25), unlimited file-size upload through FTP.
Additonal resources can be purchased in bundles of 5 licenses for Group 1 packages, while Group 2 licenses are sold as single user/employee flat rates as outlined in the plan description.
Features
Egnyte’s creative, visionary management has proven to be a most dynamic and market-oriented service. Key features relate to commercial services, scale-up resource structures, technical capabilities, value-added services, customer support, and data security. Some of Egnyte’s features are summarized below:
- Simple service registration
- Easy, systematic data management
- Efficient file sharing and data backup
- Hybrid cloud access and sharing system; e.g. local and cloud access
- Comprehensive support of mobile devices and operating systems
- On and offline file access
- Desktop and server sink capabilities
- Easy file sharing through links, attachments, etc.
- Automatic file versioning and file locking capabilities along change notifications
- Free access to business partners (with limited access)
- Multiple user-authority levels
- Simple corporate account administration at central point or centralized management system
- Mission-critical security level, including 256-bit AES encryption, SSL connections, secure key hosting and customer-managed encryption keys.
- Red-Zone level physical security meeting certified industry standards such as SAS 70 Type-II, HIPAA, Safe-Harbor, and FINRA
- Active directory support and LDAP
- System audit reports
- FTP access with secure transmission under certain security protocols
- FTP service support of market client software (FileZilla for example)
- Continuous data backup and instant file access
- Popular software such as Google docs, Salesforce, Quickoffice, and Outlook integrate with file-sharing and editing.
- World-class around the clock customer support with dedicated account managers for corporate customers;
- File and website-access branding of company information and logo according to client needs
- Simple scale up and down pricing
- Multiple plans to choose from
- Free trial period of services
- Light-weight client software applications
- Free software-application downloads for devices
Security
Egnyte incorporates multi-layered ‘Mission-critical security’ of data transport, storage, and network. It also employs physical security of its state of the art data centers through the use of motion-detecting security systems.
Data is encrypted for transport between customer machines and servers and then transported over secure SSL connections before arriving in storage, where files are stored encrypted. Security management makes use of 256-AES encryption protocol; the same used for military data transmission. FTP transportation also takes place with the help of FTPS or FTPES mechanisms.
Customer Service
Egnyte offers 24/7 customer support via telephone, email, and trouble tickets. The company website also provides documents and video guides to help customers resolve issues, and additional customer support access is available for additional charges. There are forums for getting technical and other support from technicians who either work for Egnyte or from those who use the service. Egnyte also provides live web training to customers.
The following is an illustration of a trouble ticket response that took less than 20 minutes from the time of the original ticket post.
The process (Sign-up & Install)
The process for signing up and installing the client software (local Cloud Folder or other software) for online interaction is simple. First you need to register for service. Free Trial service is availabe.
- Click Free Trial or Buy Now as shown in the following figure
- Free Trial registration is depicted below, which is free for 15 days.
- Once you complete the registration form, you will be taken immediately to your account
- From the account Home page, you can upload documents by either dragging files to the drag and drop field and selecting ‘Click here to upload’ or else by clicking Upload at top right of the page as shown in the following figure.
- If you choose the Upload icon, a pop up will appear, providing options to browse for files and upload manually (up to 1 GB) or install the desktop synch application to upload required data automatically.
- First browse a file and click Upload
- The file will upload as shown in the following figure
- To share a file from the Shared Documents directory, you can either share with a person from an existing share list, or you can invite a new contact for sharing
- To manage an uploaded file, select one of the options from the activity pan located on the right side of the selected file
- Click Share and the following pop up will appear, allowing you to either select existing users or to use the Invite New User option, as shown below
- Share documents according to allocated authority assigned to the new user for editing, etc.
- For bulk upload or automatic synchronization of local data with the cloud server, you need to run the application setup previously downloaded
- Provide a location for the local cloud, as seen in the following figure.
- Once your local cloud location has been created, you can login to the Egnyte cloud storage
- To configure folders for auto synchronization, select the folders that you would like to synchronize as shown in following figure and click Save
- The synchronization function will upload the chosen data into the configured folders.
- The following Home page is the administration area for management of data on both the local and online clouds
- Paste data in the specified location of your Local Cloud folder and select Synchronize Now to upload the data available in the local cloud location.
- A detailed activity log will appear under the Logs tab
- You can also configure automatic synchronization under the Settings tab of your account’s Home page
- Configure the type of synchronizations, usage of internet bandwidth, proxy settings and many other settings as shown in the following figure.
- Configure account settings under the Settings tab
- Switch from Egnyte cloud upload interface to the cloud access interface by clicking Access Cloud as highlighted in the following figure.
- Click the Settings wheel at top right of the page and choosing the Settings options
- You can create users and groups in this section as shown in above figure; you can also assign user authority levels
- Configure file server settings of data
- Click Personal Profile to make account information changes
- Go to the Reports tab for cloud status reports and settings
Conclusion
Egnyte is innovative, offers attractive plans, affordable prices, wonderful customer support, mission critical security and flexible options for scalability. It is a reliable service providing industry-grade network uptime, consolidated and comprehensive data storage, and quality backup and file sharing services with a simple interface and easy to follow procedure. It is a highly recommended online businesses data management solution.
I did not have a good experience with this company. First, we signed up and got the backups going, for some reason the back-ups would keep more versions then we specified and we were going over our space limit. Only after multiple “Tickets”, emails and phone calls did we get it fixed. We were threatened to have a hike on our fee, it was frustrating because we were doing everything we could to delete the data and it would not go away. Fast forward several months, we got the local cloud going, we did feel it was a service that would help us. Once we got that going, we invested in a Ready NAS Device to create an Office Cloud. We were were hit with hidden fees, there is a $60 fee per month for the Office Cloud. We were having problems and were making phone calls and tickets, it was very frustrating.
We don’t do business with vendors who are not upfront with fees not matter the amount, we feel were were victim of “bait and switch”. If they were honest about the $60 fee hike we would have been ok with it, but they never indicated that to us until we owned a $1800 NAS device and were trying to set it up. We terminated our service because of this. We will not do business with Egnyte.
Great for backing up my small business, been with them for 2 years. Highly recommended.