It would be easy for someone looking at the coverage of the file synchronization and sharing space to think that this whole cloud thing is a complete slam dunk. High profile companies like Box and Dropbox get much airtime (not surprisingly, since Box’s CEO Aaron Levie is a particularly charismatic interview subject). This trend is likely to increase if the rumored current IPO and alleged upcoming IPO for Box and Dropbox respectively come to bear. Both these companies are completely in the cloud and, since they’re the biggest names in the sector, people often forget that not everyone is ready yet to go cloud.
This view is backed up by a recent study by the Enterprise Strategy Group. Now before I go on I need to mention that the study was commissioned by Egnyte, a hybrid cloud storage vendor, as such there is a degree of skepticism that we must view the results with, but nonetheless they’re useful in informing our view of the market demand. [Update, Egnyte advised me that there were a number of sponsors of the ESG report, as such it's not quite as single vendor-centric as I first assumed] The survey talked to a few hundred IT professionals about how their organizations use file sharing and collaboration products and what their preferences when it comes to deployment options. The survey covered small, mid-sized and enterprise customers and was focused purely in the North American market. Some high level findings from the survey include:
- 91% of organizations prohibit some kind of data from being stored by third-party, cloud computing service providers
- 84% of respondents currently have a Public Cloud Model (i.e., both the application control plane and data reside in the cloud)
- 69% of respondents believe their organization would be "Extremely Interested" in an file sharing service that would allow their organization to store some or all of its file data using its own on-premises storage resources
- 54% of respondents believe flexibility and control over where data is stored is driving their organization’s interest in keeping its data on-premises
- 36% of respondents have concerns over the accessibility of public cloud- resident data to third parties
As I said, some of those findings are somewhat self-serving when it comes to Egnyte, but in my experience talking with corporate IT folks, it really reflects their current thinking about how they collaborate. At the moment the discussion tends to be somewhat polarized whereby cloud sync and share vendors conflate “cloud” and “collaboration solutions” together into one. Listening to them it would be possible to gain the impression that cloud was the only was to enjoy good collaboration around files.
Clearly this is not the case and companies like Egnyte (along with anyone else doing hybrid file sharing) is trying to change the conversation and prise apart these two themes – while cloud innately enables easy collaboration, that’s not to say that collaboration can’t happen successful in the absence of the cloud.
The interesting thing for me with these survey findings is that they’re so emphatic, especially given that it’s a North American-only survey. Given concerns about cloud storage post Snowden revelations, it’s a fairly safe bet that European organizations would be even more keen on hybrid solutions rather than cloud solutions that their North American counterparts. It would be very interesting to see global survey results – I suspect that’d be even more emphatic.
The question here for Egnyte (and, by extension, for anyone else in the space) is whether this preoccupation against the cloud is going to continue or whether organizations will get more comfortable with their data someplace else. Given the changes we’ve seen more generally in terms of accepting the cloud for all manner of workloads, it’s hard to not predict a far greater propensity to store stuff in the cloud over time. That said, vendors today are delivering solutions their prospects can buy now, and if this survey is to be believed, the hybrid cloud vendors have a large number o customers just waiting to buy from them.
