Egnyte Storage Service Combines Google Cloud, Local Data

Local storage and the Google (GOOG) cloud have become one in the most recent offering from Egnyte, which has unveiled a platform for enterprises to offer users access to data of all types from a single location. Now, the question is whether it can steal market share from alternative storage services such as Dropbox.

Egnyte has been around since 2006, and it first began offering its namesake cloud file server product in 2008. With the latest release of the platform this week, however, Egnyte now offers Google Drive integration that it says "provides enterprise customers with the flexibility and security to use the collaboration, storage and sharing tools that best fit their needs."

The solution allows users to access all of their files, whether they are stored locally or in the cloud, from a single location. Importantly, it also lets enterprise IT staff manage permissions and perform auditing on that information, which is one of the features that make Egnyte different from other services including Dropbox.

The platform highlights several trends that are important in the channel. For one, it's a rich example of the reseller opportunities that the Google cloud continues to churn out for partners large and small.

At the same time, this news is a reminder that a lot of data will continue to live locally for a good while to come. In fact, according to a March 2013 report from IDG Research, enterprises keep 61 percent of files on on-premise storage infrastructure, and will continue to do so.

That's what makes solutions that integrate local storage with the cloud, rather than try to migrate all of the former into the latter, so promising. The cloud may be more fun to write about than plain Jane local storage, and it certainly has a wide range of applicability. But the cloud is not going to monopolize storage—or do anything remotely close—for a long, long time to come.