Sharefile - Sharing is Caring

Hi All,

I'm going to change gears a bit here and talk about something new!  Don't worry, I haven't abandoned virtual desktops, just expanding into new waters.  Today I'm going to talk to you about Citrix Sharefile on NetApp storage. 

Haven't heard of Sharefile yet?  How about Dropbox?  It's a  very cool technology, and it allows users to share their files in the cloud so you can share with friends, co-workers, other companies, etc.  Ever need to send a Word document or Power Point that's larger than 10 megs?  Many times our email systems have been programed to not allow this size of files through.  10 megs might not sound like a lot of data, but multiply that time the thousands of other users that might be sending large file and you can quickly over load an infrastructure.  Also, I can save my files in the cloud, and can access it on any device!

I stand by my original assessment that users are whacky and will do things they're not supposed to, like post company data on a third party application out in the cloud.  The cloud let's us do remarkable things, the problem is, it lets us do remarkable things.  Think about it....  Where is your data, is it secure, who's downloading it, who's viewing it, who's benefiting from it?  Maybe your competition?  In a perfect world, we could trust and there wouldn't be bad people.  Unfortunately we don't live in that world and there are people who will take advantage.

So what's a company to do?  Users demand Dropbox capability, but as an administrator you need to secure that data....

<<Curtain Please>>Now introducing Sharefile! <<Screams from The Audience>>  Sharefile will give your users the ability to post their files into the cloud, but let security administrators sleep at night.  Citrix allows you to store your data on-premise, on Citrix managed storage or a combination of the two.  Being employed by a storage company, I'm going to suggest the on-premise suggestion. :-)  For more than obvious reasons, I like the on-premise because my user's data is in house.  Since the data is on-premise, I can de-dupe, compress and keep an eye on it.  Think of it as "your" cloud!

A lot more to talk about in later blogs!

Until Next Time