Public Cloud Connector

Introduction

Customers are accelerating their adoption of public clouds such as Azure and Amazon Workspaces (AWS) for storage and business operations. The trends are even more pronounced with an increasingly global workforce and a change in work culture to accommodate remote employees. 

Egnyte Public Cloud Connector(PCC) provides a solution to bridge customers' requirements for public clouds while keeping the business content on the Egnyte platform. 

Use Case Scenarios for Public Cloud Connector

Customers who have asked for Public Cloud Connector broadly have any of the below use-case scenarios and requirements

Virtual Office in the Cloud: Physical offices are not always desirable for various reasons (reduce capital cost, fully remote workers, quickly bring up "offices" for remote teams, and more). Customers have set up environments on Azure and AWS with computing and storage close to each other. They require the capability to share files with external partners with Egnyte.

Bring Your Own Bucket: This capability serves three types of use-cases.

1. Customers who have geo-residency compliance requirements for their cloud content can configure Egnyte cloud to be backed by a storage bucket in the desired geo-location.
2. Alternatively, if customers have their own cloud storage on Amazon, Azure or Google, they can configure Egnyte cloud to store content on their desired bucket location. Note that Egnyte encrypts all the content on the destination bucket and as such users cannot natively access the content from Amazon and Azure clouds.
3. Customers who want to store all the Egnyte content on Azure cloud storage and would like Egnyte to provision the Azure bucket for storing the content can configure the Public Cloud Connector app to provision an Azure bucket

Lift-and-Shift Applications: Certain applications require high-computation resources and are cost-prohibitive to set up within the physical office. These applications natively run on AWS S3 and Azure. These are customers in life-Sciences, construction, and media industries. They require to save the machine-generated files on Egnyte.

What is Public Cloud Connector?

Public Cloud Connector is an Egnyte-hosted service that serves a variety of public cloud use-cases and connects Azure and Amazon cloud storage with Egnyte. Public Cloud Connector provides a simple and intuitive UI in the cloud to either deploy Egnyte's hybrid product on Azure or AWS environments or to store Egnyte content on Azure/Amazon storage. 

To access the Public Cloud Connector app, open your web browser and navigate to your domain and sign in as an admin user.  Click on the hamburger menu in the top right corner of your domain 

 

This will navigate to the Public Cloud Connector Dashboard. From here, you can 1) set up Public Cloud Connector on Azure or AWS or 2) configure your domain for Data Residency

Click on Configure new cloud button in the widget to the left. You have multiple options:

1. Set up for Azure: Choose this option if you want to deploy a Public Cloud Connector instance within an existing resource group or in a new resource group on Azure

2. Snapshot to Azure Blob Storage: Choose this option if you want to manually take a snapshot copy of the synchronized data within the Public Cloud Connector instance to an Azure blob store. This is useful if you have applications that natively access Azure blob store

3. Set up for AWS: Choose this option if you want to deploy a Public Cloud Connector instance within an existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or in a new VPC on AWS.

4. Snapshot EBS to S3: Choose this option if you want to manually snapshot the data volume (EBS) within the Public Cloud Connector to S3 storage. This option is useful if you have applications that require to natively access the AWS S3 store.

 

To learn more about each of these options, please refer to the Public Cloud Connector product guides  below:

Public Cloud Connector for Azure

Public Cloud Connector for AWS