A Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) report titled “The Demand for Hybrid Online File Sharing Solutions” finds that more than two-thirds (69%) of current online file sharing (OFS) customers are extremely interested in hybrid online file sharing solutions (OFS), citing flexibility and control over data as the top (54%) factor driving interest. The report says OFS users of at least 6 months said they were now very interested in the ability to store some or all of their data on-premises storage resources.

Compute and storage cloud provider Egnyte claims the findings echo real life situation the vendor faces with 7 out of 10 its customers moving to hybrid within the first 90 days of deployment, more than 2/3 of all customer inquiries and pilots demanding hybrid as a part of their file sharing deployment model and more than three-fourths of Egnyte partners naming hybrid as one of their top three solution focus areas this year.
The report cites the top factors driving interest in keeping some of all data on-premises among current OFS users as follows:

• Ability and flexibility to control where data is stored - 54%
• Ability to leverage existing on-premises infrastructure investments - 41%
• Belief that we can control data better than third-party services - 38%
• Concern over accessibility of public cloud-based data to third parties - 36%
• Need to comply with government regulations - 35%
• Concern over OFS provider employees' level of access to data - 34%
• Local copy of data helps to mitigate performance concerns - 34%
• Need to comply with industry regulations - 33%
• Better balance of fixed (i.e., CAPEX) and variable (i.e., OPEX) costs makes budgeting easier - 31%

Said Egnyte VP WW field operations Steve Erbst: "Simply put, it's a matter of providing customers a choice. The cloud is great for some data & use cases but others, especially data sets that need to stay behind the firewall need to be addressed - and accessed differently."