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Egnyte Cloud Hybrid

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My name is Zach Katkin, and I’m the cofounder of Atilus, a web design company based in South Florida, and the founder of this website Zincubate.

Zincubate’s mission is to provide a comprehensive resource for small businesses to run as efficiently as possible using the web, web apps, phone apps – technology! Lately, we’ve been talking about file servers, and we believe Egnyte to be the best of them all – I reached out to Egnyte to share our story (and experience) using Egnyte on this blog.

My team and I have been avid fans and users of Egnyte for many years, and I’m really excited to have the opportunity to explain how Egnyte file servers have changed our business, saved us money, saved us time – and made us more awesome!

Efficient Setup and Implementation

Being a small business owner, I needed to evaluate a number of factors when considering a switch to Egnyte. My business partner and I had to weigh it against the pros and cons of our existing setup, as well as alternative services.

The following were extremely important to us:

  • Quick/Easy Setup (minimize time, complexity/learning curve) – One of our greatest costs is time, we have too little of it, and the less time it takes to switch to a service, the better!
  • Cost – Cost is always a factor, on a per GB basis in particular, what is the lowest cost option available that balances our other needs? What is the lowest cost option considering features, time – AND averaged over the years?
  • Security/Backup – How secure is the tool we select? Are backups done automatically? Can we back up ADDITIONAL files/computers to the service?
  • Features/Availability – What additional features does a file server service offer that might make our lives easier, or help us manage our files better?

A Balance of Simplicity & Functionality

We also use Egnyte in other ways. Egnyte is used process-wise and project-management wise as we maintain copies of all client/project’s files on Egnyte, making it absolutely essential to the entire company’s day-to-day operations.

Egnyte

The main thing we required was, and is, a file server that was centralized, but decentralized at the same time. Previously we couldn’t access our files outside the office (I’m sure we’ve all emailed ourselves files over the years!) but we can now access our files anytime anywhere and know that everything is taken care of as far as security and backup.

File Server Cost Breakdown

Egnyte offers up some impressive security features and adding/removing users is very easy to do. This proves to be very helpful in a small business, as we know how high employee turnover can get. I used to wake up at 3 am drenched in sweat worrying about my files – okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but seriously, it’s nice to not have to worry about backups or complicated permissions. Egnyte’s service just handles it.

In addition to the above features, Egnyte did offer us a cost savings. Before we made the switch to Egnyte, back when we were evaluating a file server service for our company we first asked ourselves “where are we today, what does our current file server situation look like, and how much are we spending?”

By our estimates, we were spending (before the switch) around $3000 for the first year  (or every major upgrade year) for 100GB of backed up data (for limited connectivity, i.e., in-office access only) with around $1200 per year in maintenance costs.

Back then (2006-2007), we were using an in-house Microsoft server. Our power bills for our one server alone were more expensive than Egnyte costs us today – and that’s just the power! This doesn’t include software costs and IT maintenance costs. Not to mention that we also needed to have a backup plan should things fail. This was cumbersome and dangerous if procedures weren’t followed – and we’re human – procedures weren’t always followed.

Not to mention dealing and scheduling things with anything IT can be exhausting and a waste of both time and money. We feel that although an in-house file server has a place in many organizations, on a small scale and for many small businesses the numbers (for IT services) no longer add up.

So, we switched to Egnyte.

With Egnyte, all of our file server needs are just handled. There were little costs as far as setup time– maybe ½ an hour in setting it up and a few hours to transfer files.

(An initial consultation with an IT firm would take more time than that.)

And this ease of setup has been mirrored with each of the installs we’ve done with our clients as well.

Using Egnyte, we’ve slashed more than 80% of our previous file server costs, and space upgrades are less expensive by an even greater margin. For our small business this has been huge!

egnyte

Besides decreasing costs, Egnyte offers way more than what our in-house server ever could. We can access our files from anywhere, at any time, from any computer and Egnyte is always improving. In the end, using this service has been a great win-win for us: we get more done with less out of pocket costs using Egnyte.

I would (and do) recommend Egnyte to every business with which I come into contact. There are few things more important than a great file server to grow your company, and Egnyte provides the best service we have evaluated.Similar Posts:


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