Ninefold unveils enterprise Dropbox-like service

Bundled with management software.

Ninefold has launched a file storage product that it hopes will win Australian enterprises over from consumer cloud storage services like Dropbox.

The Business Cloud Drive product combines a Ninefold storage backend with a management and security platform by US vendor Oxygen Cloud.

Ninefold managing director Peter James told iTnews that the company had an "exclusive arrangement in this part of the world" to use Oxygen's platform.

He said that the partnership had sprung up over the past several months.

"They found us at about the time we were looking for them because quite a few of their Australian prospects were looking for Australian resident storage," James said.

Oxygen Cloud notes on its website that it has an existing cloud storage service paired with its management platform. The service does not appear to have had a presence in Australia prior to the partnership with Ninefold.

James said that the new product could work well for organisations that allowed users to bring their own devices onto the corporate network.

"We see one of the big issues with the cloud is the concept of mobility and whoever's got the device effectively has control," James said.

Rather than enterprise users collaborating with each other through Dropbox or similar services, James said Ninefold's product offered an alternative that also gave administrators a way to exert greater control over the way data was shared between mobile device users.

James said rogue IT was "a bigger issue than IT", and should be a concern at CEO level.

"The CEO needs to sit down with the HR department" to create policies that prohibit enterprise data leaking out of the organisation using services like Dropbox, he said.

James said the service was cross-platform and could be used by Windows, Mac and Linux users.

The software is charged at $12,000 a year for a 100-seat license, plus a $5500 set-up fee plus 9c per GB per month for storage. It is backed by a 99.9 percent SLA.

Asked whether the service is partitioned from Ninefold's existing cloud storage service, a spokesman said it "utilises EMC Atmos’ multi-tenancy design to segregate user data."

"Each customer is assigned a unique Atmos subtenant account and runs private Oxygen Gateway appliances in their Ninefold virtual compute environments," the spokesman said.

"Customers can also elect to run an Oxygen AD/LDAP gateway in their own data centre or in Ninefold as appropriate."