Egnyte debuts cloud-agnostic approach to storage with ‘Cloud Control’

Enterprise cloud storage startup Egnyte has debuted Cloud Control, its next-gen content and sharing infrastructure product that should give its users more flexibility over cloud strategies.

Egnyte helps businesses with various hybrid cloud storage solutions and competes with Box, Zetta, and others. Through increased marketing efforts and a tightly focused anti-Box campaign, the company has now collected more than 1 million users across 30,000 paying customers.

The company wants to continue its momentum with Cloud Control. It describes Cloud Control as a way to “stitch together a quilt of different storage devices and cloud types” and provide security for your data even if you use a third party like Amazon or Rackspace.

Here’s the full jargon-filled description, if that’s your bag:

Cloud Control allows customers to stitch together a quilt of different storage devices and cloud types into a Global Name Space that gives users access to files irrespective of location, device type, or storage cloud. In this way, storage is effectively decoupled from the application and nodes can be strategically placed in different geographies to take advantage of access patterns. Content can live completely behind the firewall, in a third-party storage cloud such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc. or in Egnyte’s public cloud. Within corporate networks, Cloud Control works off of existing file system structures, does not force deployment of proprietary file systems and allows direct access to local shares. This approach is exclusive to Egnyte and allows enterprises to retain all the benefits of the cloud, such as scalability, elasticity and security.

“Cloud Control is a truly unique approach to the problem of where enterprise data lives,” Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain told VentureBeat via email. “With this solution we have decoupled data from the application. You can access any data, assuming you have permission, regardless of where it lives. Public or private, behind the firewall or in the open, people can do their work and access what they need, securely and easily.”

Cloud Control is currently in beta for select users and will be publicly available at the end of the first quarter in 2013.

Egnyte also announced its new “EgnytePlus partner and developer programs” today. They bring companies such as DocuSign, NetApp, NetGear, and IBM into the fold so Egnyte solutions work better with their hardware and software.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Egnyte was founded in 2007 and has raised a total of $32 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Polaris Venture Partners, and Floodgate Fund.

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Photo illustration via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
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