“There are people who are paranoid about public cloud, for good reason. There are a lot of reasons to use a public cloud. It’s just not something that we do here.” So says Tom Sparks, Director of Network Operations at Norse, the cybersecurity startup that operates a distributed network of sensors and crawlers that process hundreds of terabytes of data daily looking for signs of cyber-attacks. For file sharing between its employees, Norse uses a solution from an up-and-coming cloud storage startup, AeroFS. Based in Palo Alto, California, AeroFS has raised a total of $14.5 million to build its file-sharing solution. Unlike market leaders Box and Dropbox, AeroFS enables each customer to keep all their files within the company’s private network. It’s cloud storage, without the cloud. “Customers come to us because they wouldn’t even consider the well-known cloud storage companies,” says AeroFS founder and CEO Yuri Sagalov. “They value their data and they want to own it and control it.” AeroFS is growing rapidly,
AeroFS launched a new pricing model whereby organizations with less than 30 users can obtain the product for free. AeroFS is a small company that is trying to compete with some big names - They're broadly in the same category as Box and Dropbox, but their service doesn't store data in the public cloud. AeroFS has something of a novel approach to storage - it allows you to sync files between multiple computers. All data stays on customers' computers and is encrypted in transit. By not relying on the public cloud, AeroFS differentiates itself from Box and Dropbox (not to mention Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive) and moves more into the orbit of companies like Accellion and Egnyte. Both these vendors provide a file sharing and collaboration platform leveraging whichever storage their customers wish to use. But by not having to store data on third party servers, AeroFS takes the model even further and provides functionality with which even the most nervous of individuals will feel comfortable.
AeroFS is an enterprise file synchronization and sharing solutions that enhance the experience of collaboration. The company doesn't use a public cloud, instead users are able to sync using different computers by not storing their files in third party servers. AeroFS is deployed as a virtual appliance on your infrastructure and as apps on your user’s devices, giving you complete deployment flexibility and keeping your data within your enterprise. AeroFS uses a private cloud to store files, and operates behind the corporate firewalls for all the data to stay securely in the infrastructure. The company also uses smart routing, allowing 80-90 megabytes per second while eliminating single points of failure during the deployment. The company has a pricing model that allows for organizations of 30 people or less to use the product for free.
