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Pros
- Now has mapped drives for desktop users
- Scans for sensitive, industry- and jurisdiction-specific data
- Behavior analysis helps predict anomalous employee conduct
- Integrates with multiple third-party data-sharing services
- Multiple account authentication options
- Customer-specific encryption keys
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Cons
- Limited pricing granularity, which may be off-putting to smaller businesses
- Performance issues crop up if best practices aren’t followed
- Classifying data is a slow process
Egnyte Enterprise Specs
Authenticated External Sharing | |
Cloud Storage Without Local File System Sync | |
Digital Rights Management | |
File Conflict Management | |
Group Permissions | |
Local File System Sync | |
Mobile Apps | |
Partial / Differential Sync | |
Public Sharing | |
Remote Wipe | |
Team Folders | |
White Label Branding |
Egnyte is a business cloud storage and file-sharing service that has repositioned itself in the last few years. Rather than simply focusing on helping companies move their files to the cloud, it's become a data governance solution targeting businesses that require certainty regarding how their data is handled. Life sciences, finance, engineering, government and defense, and health care are just a few of the highly regulated industries where you'll find Egnyte, but the product's features are certainly not limited to those sectors. Any business that needs strict control over how its data is stored and used can find a use case for Egnyte, because it offers a wide range of integrations with other services.
In addition, Egnyte has a lot of utility as a cloud storage and file-sharing tool, even if you don't use its data governance features. Egnyte is a jack-of-all-trades product, which is a big reason why it's one of our Editors' Choice winners for business cloud storage solutions, alongside Microsoft OneDrive for Business. That said, you'll have a harder time differentiating Egnyte from other, similar offerings if you don't need the service's data governance elements.
Egnyte's Pricing and Product Tiers
Egnyte has three feature tiers. Unfortunately, it only discloses pricing for the Business tier upfront; anything above that requires a custom quote. The Business tier costs $20 per user per month when paid annually, and it includes file storage, collaboration tools, and basic ransomware protection.
Among the custom-priced tiers, Enterprise Lite adds third-party source support, content lifecycle management, and threat detection. If you need the works, the Enterprise tier adds privacy and compliance features, in addition to advanced ransomware and recovery tools. It also gives you the full gamut of data governance features, which is what really sets modern-day Egnyte apart from previous versions.
The closest comparisons I could find to the Egnyte Enterprise tier were Box Enterprise ($35 per user per month) and Dropbox Business Advanced ($24 per user per month). Although those competing services scan for personal information and offer some degree of classification, they lack the same level of industry- and jurisdiction-specific features that Egnyte provides.
![Egnyte's collaboration and file sharing tools](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/02igqLQsbzBFpKD4rN6vqSq-7.png)
Getting Started With Egnyte Enterprise
Egnyte's layout is fairly typical of products in this industry, with a side panel offering quick links to the home screen, recent files, and file library. Additionally, you can find links to potential malware, settings, reports, integrations, and help. The last option is Egnyte University, which is basically free training on how to use the product.
Anyone who has used Box or Dropbox before isn’t going to struggle using Egnyte. Files are laid out in a collapsible side panel that contains the folder breakdown of everything you’ve uploaded. Files are separated into private folders and folders that you've shared with other people.
In addition to File Sharing and Collaboration, you can also access Secure & Govern from the upper-left menu. This is where you search for sensitive content, apply security policies, perform legal holds, and generally ensure that your data storage falls within regulator compliance. There you'll define and maintain folder permissions (either by user or group).
Egnyte also offers Public Cloud Connector, a powerful feature for businesses that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure for storage. This tool is outside the scope of many small businesses; it's aimed at larger companies using desktop as a service (DaaS), a setup that sees users' machines virtually created in the cloud. It's also for businesses that deploy custom solutions that require integration with Egnyte for file storage. You can find more information on Public Cloud Connector in Egnyte University.
Finally, Egnyte has a few data migration options, including the most common: the Migration App. The application is easy to install, and it silently migrates data from local file servers to the cloud. The Migration App has limitations. For example, it can't migrate existing file permissions that haven’t already been established in Egnyte, or data stored in other platforms, such as Box or Dropbox. In those situations, you should reach out to Egnyte’s Professional Services team for alternate solutions.
![Viewing and co-editing online documents with Egnyte](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/02igqLQsbzBFpKD4rN6vqSq-8.png)
Egnyte's Document Sharing and Collaboration Tools
Although Dropbox and similar solutions have offered local syncing for a long time, Egnyte has only recently added mapped drive. In other words, adding and removing files is as simple as the same drag-and-drop operations of a local network. The process is seamless when appropriately used. In fact, you may forget that you're using a cloud-based service.
Simulating a mapped drive is not without issues, though. The desktop application uses two times the disk space when content is added to prevent corruption while data is being edited. As a result, you may want to avoid migrating large files or uploading large amounts of data at a time.
There are unsupported file types to avoid, such as active database files, so it’s important to take that into consideration. You should read Egnyte's best practices for using the desktop app before deploying it.
Egnyte integrates with many popular cloud services, including, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. In addition to the Egnyte WebEdit plug-in that delivers document-editing functionality, the service's Microsoft Office integration lets you leverage Excel, PowerPoint, and Word Online to co-edit documents.
With the Google Workspace plug-in, you can use Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as an alternative. The documents are fully managed by Egnyte, so you retain valuable Egnyte permissions. This functionality is available even if you don't use the desktop client, so people who use the web-based Egnyte aren't excluded.
Egnyte's Data Governance Features
Egnyte recognizes that most businesses will not live in a single cloud ecosystem. Data may live on a file server, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or any number of additional locations. It's challenging to ensure that the data is safe to store in such a fashion, and that it remains compliant with local laws and regulations. Anyone familiar with GDPR and SOX knows that importance.
As a result, Egnyte offers a data governance feature to Enterprise and Enterprise Lite users that lets them automatically classify documents according to selected rules, and then enforce those classifications with policies. For instance, you can block people from sharing data outside of Egnyte’s platform if it’s inappropriate or illegal.
It's easy to use. The first step is to head to the settings menu and set up content sources. You can add on-premises sources outside of Egnyte, as well as other popular cloud storage locations. Using Dropbox with the data governance tool was as easy as logging into my Dropbox account and giving access to Egnyte.
Next, you select policies that apply to your specific industry or jurisdiction. Egnyte lays this out by category, and it’s as simple as checking a box for each: Finance, General Privacy, Government & Defense, and Healthcare are all represented. I picked compliance with PCI-DSS and SOX, but there are many other regulatory frameworks available. You can customize policies, too. I then uploaded a few documents to watch the classification and scanning process take place.
However, it quickly became clear that it wasn't an instant process. It took several hours to detect and properly classify just three files, since they were of significant size and contained images. The Egnyte website stated that this process can take a few hours to a week. Once classified, the test data was appropriately identified, and Egnyte offered a risk score for each file. It’s impressive functionality, if a bit slow.
One of the most powerful tools works in tandem with the desktop client. Once a machine is governed, an administrator can control files on that machine and how they're handled. In addition, Egnyte's behavioral analysis reports and alerts offer possible insight into an employee's state of mind. For example, if an employee starts downloading entire folders at a time when they usually only grab a few at a time, there’s potential that they may be leaving the company. This lets business owners make some moves in advance to protect their data.
But this capability is also a double-edged sword. While this level of monitoring is perfectly within expectations for a company-owned laptop, a bring-your-own device (BYOD) scenario might make the employee a bit uncomfortable installing the desktop client.
![Egnyte's governance dashboard](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/02igqLQsbzBFpKD4rN6vqSq-9.png)
Egnyte's Integrations and APIs
Outside of those core features, Egnyte integrates with an enormous number of third-party services and applications including Azure, Box, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Drive.
Because Egnyte recognizes that business data lives in multiple places, the company has made attempts to cover as much ground as possible to aid you in classifying and securing data. For businesses that have a specific need beyond what is offered out of the box, there’s also the RESTful API that companies can use to build custom solutions.
Edgyte's Authentication and Security Features
Every SaaS business needs users to authenticate accounts, and supporting more than one method is the modern best practice. Egnyte supports a variety of authentication methods, including Active Directory and many of the single sign-on (SSO) options available, such as Google Authenticator, Okta, and OneLogin. Although most folks using an SSO service leverage the included multi-factor authentication, Egnyte offers its own two-step login verification that can be enabled via the settings menu.
There’s a lot on the line when you are dealing with sensitive data. There are two main considerations when assessing security: survivability and vulnerability.
In the instance of a natural disaster, you don’t want all your eggs kept in one basket. That means you want your data both geographically distributed and highly available. In the past, Egnyte had its own data centers, but the company now uses Google Cloud. Google's offering has multiple, well-protected data centers spanning North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. So if a world-changing event occurs, you can be certain that your data is alive and well in at least one other location.
The second component, vulnerability, is a bit trickier to address, but Egnyte has done a great job here, too. All data is encrypted at rest, which is something that most services claim. However, Egnyte goes a step further with customer-specific encryption keys, as opposed to common keys. This makes it far less likely that your data would be exposed in the event of a leak.
Enterprise-tier customers can tap Egnyte Key Management, a feature that lets customers manage their own encryption keys. This gives you a lot of control over who has the final say in decrypting your data. However, if you lose that key, your data is toast.
Egnyte recently added anti-ransomware features, too. If, for whatever reason, your data gets wiped out by a threat, Egnyte lets you roll that data back. This somewhat overlaps with endpoint protection (EP) services, but it makes sense to be there. There are other products that do this, but not every anti-virus and EP service does. I like to think of this as a last resort, as it’s better just not to get infected in the first place. That being said, if you slip up, this is your insurance policy. Egnyte also has built-in malware and threat detection.
![Egnyte detects sensitive data](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/02igqLQsbzBFpKD4rN6vqSq-10.png)
Egnyte Is Enterprise-Worthy Cloud Storage
If you are in the market for an alternative to in-house file storage, Egnyte is a highly practical tool for business owners navigating the complex, difficult path of ensuring that their data is being correctly used within regulatory jurisdictions and industry-specific confines. You may not find significant differences between Egnyte and other popular document-sharing and collaboration tools if you purchase the entry-level tier. However, you can count on the Enterprise tier to help you better understand how your data is being handled. Even with its minor flaws, Egnyte does an excellent job of closing the information gap, which is why it reigns as an Editors' Choice winner for business cloud storage and file-sharing services.
For more, check out The Best Business Cloud Storage and File Sharing Providers.