London, United Kingdom – Storage Made Easy today announced the general availability of the SME Cloud Control Appliance, their on-site enterprise file share and sync (EFSS) application.

Unlike other Enterprise File Sync and Share products the SME product is storage agnostic and works with a mix of existing public cloud data and on-premise cloud data.

Jim Liddle Storage Made Easy CEO stated, “The SME Cloud Control Appliance fills a market gap for a solution truly designed for Enterprise customers who already have many private data stores and who have also either embraced cloud in a limited way or who have cloud sprawl control problems.”

“SME is device agnostic, storage agnostic, App agnostic, and also infrastructure agnostic. In contrast, SME’s competitors are adding to cloud sprawl problems rather than providing solutions. Companies don’t need more data stores, they need ways to control their data and ways to use existing and new cloud services with confidence.”

The Storage Made Easy Cloud Control Appliance enables companies and service providers to offer a sophisticated enterprise file share and sync service that works with existing storage clouds including OpenStack, Amazon S3, Eucalyptus, EMC Atmos, Amazon S3 and, in total, over 40 Cloud Storage Providers.

The SME Appliance adds the critical “missing pieces” that companies need to maintain enterprise-class standards of compliance, namely identity management integration, governance, security and audit controls.

The Cloud Control Appliance integrates with existing Identity Managements systems such as LDAP and Active Directory providing federate access into joined up data.

The Appliance secures data stored on external clouds by enabling companies to set a private key. This enables companies to know any sensitive data is stored securely when stored off-site. Companies also have the option of leaving data in-situ on-site behind the firewall and encrypting it before sharing.

Governance polices enable companies to set polices against data, such as password protection of files and / or time expiry. GEO location polices can be also be set that allow, for example, a specific sub office only to access a specific folder from a specific location from a specific device (web, desktop or mobile app).

Audit controls enable companies to have a full audit history of all file events across all private and public corporate data sources which increasingly becoming a pre-requisite when sharing or exposing data.

Jim Liddle, CEO, stated, “with the Cloud Control Appliance it is possible to have your staff share a password protected document directly via an Outlook or Mac Mail plugin that is set to time expire after 24 hours and in which the remote recipient will have their IP address logged on access and it does not matter whether that data is stored on Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, Salesforce, Amazon S3, or the corporate FTP location.”

“The beta trial take up of our behind the firewall cloud control product has been incredible” continued Liddle, “we already have customers such as the service provider WebHosting.net and the global retail customer Lush using the Appliance with OpenStack, and we have other global customers such as Genie, ThinkOn, Finser and Eleco PLC using the Appliance either in an ISP or direct corporate fashion. In total we have 25 enterprise customers of the Cloud Control Appliance from our initial beta roll out and we are currently still in trial with over 50 others, the largest of which is evaluating SME with OpenStack for corporate use for over 150,000 users. This is in addition to the 200,000 personal and business customers we already have on our direct hosted service.”

“Unlike our competitors Storage Made Easy is focused on “joining up” the existing data sprawl that companies have and providing solutions to the challenges of the cloud as well as providing the controls IT require to protect the companies data which is a corporations biggest asset.”

Storage Made Easy Cloud Control Appliance is a software appliance hosted by 3rd party IaaS infrastructure or as an Appliance running in a customer’s own data center and is now generally available.

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SME Cloud Control Appliance
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Storage Made Easy provide an Enterprise File Share and Sync solution that uniquely allows IT to regain control of ‘cloud sprawl’, unifying private and public file sharing into a single, converged storage infrastructure that can easily be managed and be used to set governance and audit controls. Storage Made Easy is wholly owned by Vehera Ltd., a private London-based limited company. Copyright (C) 2013 Storage Made Easy. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo and Mac OS X platforms are trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.