EMC Applies Policy Engine to File Transfer Service

Compliance in a mobile computing world where every user assumes they have the right to access almost any data regardless of whether they have permission has become a major headache for IT organizations.

Of course, cloud computing services have just exacerbated that problem by making it easy for users to store data outside of any platform controlled by the internal IT organization.

To address that issue, EMC acquired Syncplicity to allow internal IT organizations to essentially deliver file transfer services of their own, thereby eliminating the need for end users to rely on external services such as Dropbox.com. At the EMC World 2013 conference today, EMC took that capability one step further by adding a policy engine to Syncplicity that allows IT organizations to control who gets to access what files based on their role in the organization or the rights they have to access specific folders.

According to Jeff Schultz, chief marketing officer for EMC’s Syncplicity business unit, that capability means that the rights that can be assigned to, for example, the legal team can differ markedly from what other end users in the organization might get.

The Syncplicity policy engine will later this year also invoke EMC’s new ViPR storage controller technology to help organizations manage where files are stored across hybrid cloud computing environments, which can now include EMC VNX storage systems as a platform for storing files alongside other EMC storage systems.

While end users will always engage “shadow IT” services to one degree or another, it’s pretty clear that in the age of mobile and cloud computing, usage of those services has spun out of control. Most of the reason for that can be attributed to the fact that most internal IT organizations have not been able to provide an effective alternative to file transfer services in the cloud. Increasingly, however, internal IT organizations now have the tools they need to close that gap.