Company A is a television station that sends reporters out into the field to capture videos and photos, which are then sent back to the company to be consumed by news content producers. Reporters in the field are often stationed in poor internet access areas, making it difficult to upload information for live news coverage quickly.
Company A used Citrix ShareFile for the reason mentioned above. Citrix ShareFile does not allow external file access or file sharing directly from file servers, so it had to adapt its workflow. Citrix offered particular cloud storage locations for reporters in the field to upload content, which the organization had to use. IT will have to manually copy the content from Citrix cloud storage to their file servers so that internal content creators could access it and prepare it for news coverage.
Citrix ShareFile also required the TV-Station to upload files to these specific storage locations to share them with external business partners and view and edit them from a browser or mobile device. This transition to purely cloud-based storage services for external file access, sharing, and collaboration from in-house storage solutions also resulted in Data Sprawl and higher cost.
The changing paradigm of working away from the office has led to individuals relying on various cloud services to access their work documents. Rather than having employees adopt the practice of storing files in public-facing cloud solutions such as ShareFile, Dropbox, or Google Drive, enterprises should consider going for a private file-sharing solution accessible to employees over the internet. Company A decided to adopt a solution that would not require any re-engineering and will work with its existing network shares without compromise. It also eliminated data sprawl as employees could directly access file server shares to access the content and easily upload the content captured in the field.
ShareFile is one of the most expensive file sharing solutions globally, while most of the ShareFile features are becoming commodities. CentreStack is far less costly, with more features that address more pain points. As a self-hosted ShareFile alternative, CentreStack maximizes data privacy, security, and control.
The platform provides significant business benefits for those looking for a ShareFile replacement by treating file servers and cloud storage as equally valid options, depending on business needs. Consequently, users get the same interface and experience whether they are working remotely or on-premises, on a mobile device or desktop, on a file server, or in the cloud. At the same time, admins can easily maintain centralized control of access to critical business data.
Sure, you'll save $10,000 per year for 100 users than ShareFile, but there are other significant benefits like data privacy, security, and control. Backed by years of file server cloud-mobility enhancements, CentreStack provides a file server-friendly collaboration platform focused on keeping your data private, secure, and under your control while simplifying the user interface and experience. The file server approach prevents the hard temptation for users to subvert any security measures to protect.
As shown in the case study above, it is ubiquitous for companies to keep internal file servers for various reasons, including application compatibility to business continuity. It is cumbersome to use a file server for one purpose and then use Citrix ShareFile for another purpose.
When the solution combines different business use cases on one single data platform, your file servers already have a significant usability improvement. Now employees have one place to go for secure remote access and mobile file sharing. Additionally, features like drive mapping, file locking, and offline editing enhance the usability further.
CentreStack is used by businesses and service providers to privately deploy or host a ShareFile alternative as an on-premises file sharing solution. The solution provides an access layer (browser, mobile, desktop, and file server access) for local file servers and private cloud storage services. The platform does this while retaining complete control of data and the related access infrastructure.
Businesses can address data privacy concerns by using CentreStack as a ShareFile alternative that keeps data on-premises. Alternatively, Managed Service Providers may choose to deploy CentreStack in a private cloud like AWS or Azure.
ShareFile plugins have to replicate network shares to provide remote access. CentreStack provides the option to access data on your existing file shares remotely. CentreStack also uses current NTFS permissions and Active Directory users.
With ShareFile, the user experience changes based on data location, user location and device. For example, accessing a ShareFile account from a mobile device or browser is quite different from accessing file shares with a mapped drive.
Reduce bandwidth and storage consumption with synchronization on-demand. Automatically use existing users and permissions to save setup time and money. For 100 users, CentreStack costs less than $6,000 per year while ShareFile is about $14400.
Administrators can be overwhelmed managing data across file servers, ShareFile accounts, email and other file access or sharing mechanisms. CentreStack provides a single platform with unified management for all access scenarios.
For complete control and visibility, administrators can manage permissions from the file server that was their source or natively with CentreStack.
CentreStack does not require that all the users exist in Active Directory. Users may right-click to share content with anyone who has an email address.
CentreStack adds cloud backup features to file servers. For file server network shares, optionally, the administrators can migrate them to the cloud.
CentreStack provides a white-labeled platform that makes it easy for MSP partners to build a private cloud file server solution based on infrastructure from Amazon, Azure, or Google.
CentreStack provides two levels of file locking and version controls to protect distributed access. Files are locked automatically when online, and users can also do manual check-out when planning to go offline.
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