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) for Storage Sync and Smart Cache provides a solution to bridge customers' requirements for public clouds while keeping the business content on the Egnyte platform.
Egnyte Public Cloud Connector is available on Enterprise plans. Contact your account manager or Egnyte Sales team
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 or Amazon storage.
To access the Public Cloud Connector app:
- Open the web browser, navigate to the domain and sign in as an admin user. Click on the hamburger menu in the top left corner of the page and select Public Cloud Connector.
- This will navigate the user to the Public Cloud Connector Dashboard.
- From here, the user can:
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Set up a New Cloud Connection: Choose the hybrid device type - either Smart Cache or Storage Sync. Then choose Azure or AWS to automatically deploy Smart Cache or Storage Sync within the respective cloud environment.
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Snapshot to Azure Blob Storage: Choose this option 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 the users have applications that natively access Azure blob store.
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Snapshot EBS to S3: Choose this option to manually snapshot the data volume (EBS) within the Public Cloud Connector to S3 storage. This option is useful if the users have applications that require to natively access the AWS S3 store.
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Set up a New Cloud Connection: Choose the hybrid device type - either Smart Cache or Storage Sync. Then choose Azure or AWS to automatically deploy Smart Cache or Storage Sync within the respective cloud environment.
Use Case Scenarios for Public Cloud Connector - Storage Sync
Customers who have asked for Public Cloud Connector - Storage Sync 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.
- 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 saving the machine-generated files on Egnyte.
Use Case Scenarios for Public Cloud Connector - Smart Cache
The following are the primary use cases for Public Cloud Connector - Smart Cache.
- Accelerate data access for AI/Machine Learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads: AI/ML training and HPC workloads often process large datasets and require repeated, high-speed access to the same files. By using PCC to deploy Smart Cache on public cloud compute instances (such as EC2 or Azure VMs) close to GPU and HPC clusters, data can be cached locally while remaining centrally managed in Egnyte. This significantly reduces data access latency, improves I/O throughput, and accelerates iterative model training without duplicating or permanently relocating datasets.
- Run SMB-dependent applications in the public cloud without workflow changes: Many applications rely on SMB UNC paths for everyday file operations. Deploying Smart Cache in the public cloud using Public Cloud Connector allows these applications to access data over SMB with low latency, while keeping the authoritative data in Egnyte Cloud. By placing the cache close to cloud-hosted users and applications, Smart Cache improves responsiveness for open, save, and browse operations, supports concurrent access, and enables organizations to modernize their infrastructure without changing existing application workflows.
- Complete Cloud-native deployments without on-prem infrastructure: For organizations moving entirely to public cloud environments, PCC enables Smart Cache deployment without any on-prem hardware. Smart Cache runs as a cloud-native component, providing localized caching, secure synchronization, and centralized management through Egnyte. This supports cloud-first and cloud-only strategies while delivering predictable performance for distributed users and workloads.
Improving file access performance for cloud-hosted virtual desktops (VDI) is not yet supported. Contact the Product team for further information.
Other Use cases for Public Cloud Connector
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Bring Your Own Bucket: This capability serves three types of use-cases.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Choose Public Cloud Connector - Smart Cache vs Storage Sync
| PCC Smart Cache | PCC Storage Sync |
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To learn more about each of these options, please refer to the Public Cloud Connector product guides below: