Do your employees have a “Dropbox problem?” Are they storing sensitive company data on public cloud servers outside of your company’s policy and regulatory guidelines and ultimately out of your control? The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) phenomenon as it applies to commonly used public cloud options like the aforementioned Dropbox, or Google Drive or Box makes it frighteningly easy for users to store sensitive company data outside your company’s control for easy access via tablets and smartphones.
OwnCloud is a solution that offers all of the great things about public cloud storage but puts the cloud under your direct control in your own private cloud. You can deploy it by itself on your own servers or you can seamlessly integrate it with other cloud-storage services, using the application’s security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools to manage not only your own private cloud storage, but those from multiple other cloud storage services as well. You can then access that storage from your mobile device, your desktop, or a Web browser. You can also sync your data with local devices and share your data either with the world at large or specific, approved users. It also includes granular permissions so end users can determine who can do what with shared data. As soon as files are transferred to the server they are encrypted for storage using AES encryption, making it unreadable to anyone but the owner of the file. Finally, the program offers enhanced logging, giving you a complete and audit-able history for each file on the server.
OwnCloud offers a free-open source download or a commercial version. For larger companies, OwnCloud offers an Enterprise Edition starting at $15 per month for a minimum of 50 users. With all of the current buzz about Edward Snowdon, the NSA and PRISM, many organizations are taking a hard look at how their company data is being stored and how easily it can be accessed by outsiders. The option of of creating your own private cloud with OwnCloud just might make a lot of sense.
For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 920 0788 x210.
