The Cloudian partnership with Storage Made Easy adds an enterprise file sync-and-share capability to the core Cloudian offering. Cloudian and its channel partners will resell the joint solution.

Object storage vendor Cloudian and data management vendor Storage Made Easy [SME] have launched an enterprise-wide file sync-and-share solution which will go to market through Cloudian and its partners. It is specifically aimed at compliance regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation, which recently went into force in the EU.

The collaboration took place both to solve a persistent customer problem and to respond to a specific opportunity created by the introduction of the GDPR.

“We had an interest in this before the GDPR because of customers asking about file sharing,” said Jon Toor, Cloudian’s Chief Marketing Officer. “They are interested in scalable file solutions and file sharing is a piece of that. We know that a lot of our customers have file, and for that we offer our own HyperFile software. That’s great for the data centre or the four walls of enterprise but HyperFile was never set up to be a collaboration solution. It’s  not set up for sync and share.”

This type of regulation can be draconian for non-compliance, and it is not unique. In late June, the state of California passed The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which goes into force in 2020, and is very similar to the GDPR.

“The enforcement mechanism for that is right in our own backyard, and California regulators are known for being pretty stringent,” Toor said. “GDPR requires data to be in a specific geographic boundary. That’s why customers have bought Cloudian, so we have been dealing with that kind of customer for a while. With GDPR that requirement is only growing.”

What SME adds to that, Toor said, is the ability to detect the location of who is accessing that information.

“That’s important because it lets you restrict certain geographies, and thus minimize risk,” Toor said.

Cloudian is an on-prem storage vendor, while SME is primarily cloud, but Toor said that the collaboration has synergies.

“We work with a lot of applications that straddle both worlds,” he stated. “We can help with the on-prem component in hybrid cloud.”

The joint solution provides collaboration software with access controls and content indexing to continuously monitor for the use of regulated personal data. It recognizes more than 60 data types, including credit card, passport and social security numbers.

“We chose to work with them because their UI’s ease of use is first and foremost,” Toor said. “With a UI, users typically want to see a hierarchy, and this is very easy to use, and you can see where any file is physically stored. This was also designed from the start with S3 in mind, and it supports many device platforms for it, which gives us many devices into S3 environment. The features are also excellent because this is all that they do. For example, shared links can be time limited, which is a useful touch.”

Object storage, being image based, typically isn’t search friendly at all, but Toor said they key here is that the solution involves two pieces.

“The search is done at the data mover level before it gets on the object store,’ Toor said.

The joint solution is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android platforms, and includes configurable synchronization options that let users control where data is replicated, and integration with Microsoft Office and email applications.

Cloudian will take the joint solution to market.

“Reselling SME on our line card is a new thing for us, as we don’t resell a lot of third party software,” Toor said. “It makes sense to do this though, because it’s so complementary.”