Over the last few years smartphones and tablets have proliferated at record rate and across the world, enterprises are embracing this mobility, including Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategies that enable employee-owned devices for office work. The biggest use case for enterprise mobility has been to allow employees to access, edit, annotate and share corporate data from anywhere (even outside the corporate network) and from any device of their choice.
As file sharing, anywhere access and enterprise mobility are entering mainstream, analysts like Gartner, Forrester, IDG and Frost & Sullivan are starting to analyze market trends, competitive landscape and publishing their opinions in reports like Magic Quadrant and market scope. A formal name, Enterprise File Sharing and Sync or, EFSS in short, has been coined by Gartner for this market. What started as “Enterprise Dropbox” or “Dropbox Replacement” or "Secure Dropbox" a few years back, has now shaped up into a different and more mature market, which is no longer limited to “online file sharing” or “file sync and share”; it also encompasses secure anywhere (mobile) access, mobile collaboration for end-users and includes enterprise mobility management (EMM), digital rights management (DRM) and data loss prevention (DLP). CIOs, CISOs and IT Managers need to evaluate EFSS from various perspectives including security, DLP, DRM, control, visibility, compliance and governance – particularly in highly regulated and security conscious verticals.
Looking at the multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity, many vendors, claiming themselves to be EFSS providers, have emerged. But there are a select few who are really enterprise-ready (looking at the requirements holistically). During our conversations with enterprise prospects we mostly come across names of Accellion, Citrix ShareFile, EMC Syncplicity and Watchdox. We will run a series of blogs comparing Vaultize to each of them, how Vaultize leapfrogs the competition and why it is the most secure EFSS solution giving peace of mind to IT – particularly looking at the recent high profile security breaches involving consumer solutions like iCloud and Dropbox.
We do not include Box as direct competitor because we see it more of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) play and it does not work very well with the existing repositories. Also, we are not including Egnyte and Owncloud as we feel that their implementation of EFSS is more SMB focused.
We will be using following key points for the comparisons:
- End-user Perspective
- Mobile-first Experience
- Integrated Mobile Collaboration and Anywhere Access
- Freedom
- Efficiency
- Privacy
- IT Perspective
- Platform Approach
- End-to-end Security
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Data Protection (integrated Endpoint Backup)
- Access Controls
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and BYOD Support
- Efficiency needed for enterprise mobility
- Flexibility
- ROI
So, stay tuned for more blog posts in this series.
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