Introduction
This white paper describes CentreStack for service providers and
Enterprises. The solution can be used by businesses and service providers to privately
deploy and host a Dropbox-like on premise file sync and share solution, providing an access layer (browser, mobile,
desktop and file server access) around local file servers and private cloud storage service,
and retaining full control of data and the related access infrastructure.
The CentreStack solution can be used to seamlessly extend a Windows file server to the cloud, while maintaining drive mapping, file locking, on-demand file synchronization,
while keeping the NTFS permissions and Active Directory identities.
Quite often, our MSP partners refer to it as the self-hosted dropbox alternative
solution and our business customers refer to it as an enterprise dropbox on premise
alternative solution.
Many of your business customers are now faced with the Dropbox problem. The employees
of the business are using Dropbox on their own to backup some local folders and
make them easy to access from home, from an airport and in general, from all over the Internet.
However, from business perspective,
it is not good that company documents be scattered on multiple PCs and
in different places on third party sites, creating liabilities for regulatory obligations and leakage
of business confidential documents.
For businesses that started to use Dropbox, they quickly find out dropbox is not a good fit for team collaboration because of the following reasons:
- Every
file is replicated to everyone's PC and folders in an unnecessary way.
- Quite often, the collaboration can't start until the full synchronization
is finished and user's PC hard drive capacity is too small to finish.
- There is no permission defined like the NTFS permission to control file level access so everyone gets access to every file.
- There is no file locking for collaboration between employees.
- When some problem occurs, it requires interaction with a third party hosting company to troubleshoot since the data ownership is not local.
Many of them are turning to you now for an answer. Since you are already manage
important IT infrastructure for your customers, it would be great for you to self-host
and manage an on premise dropbox-like service for your business customers or for employees in
your own company.
CentreStack provides a solution for the problem above. First it enables
service providers and businesses to install and host the solution completely on-premise or inside
their data center. Second, it can be integrated with on-premise file servers for the following properties:
- Files and folders Integration
- NTFS permissions Integration
- Active Directory identities Integration
Implementation
It is recommended that CentreStack be installed on Windows 2012
R2 servers or Windows 2016 or Windows 2019 servers as shown in the following configuration. You can connect
the Active Directory to the CentreStack instance as the user manager.
You can also connect your local file server to the CentreStack Server.
Summary
CentreStack leverages the local connectivity to Active Directory and
local storage solution to create a self-hosted, on premise dropbox alternative solution.
The benefit is to give security and control back in the hands of the service providers, enterprises and the
customers.
For more information, please contact Gladinet Support @ enterprise@gladinet.com
or visit http://www.centrestack.com