Egnyte analyses 25 PBs of data to discover how businesses manage their content

Is your organisation wasting storage on video files? Is your cloud storage solution the best option for your business? Will businesses move completely away from on-premise storage? A team of data scientists wanted to find out the answer to these questions.

Mountain View CA-based business content and collaboration platform Egnyte did a deep dive analysis of its customer data stored in 2016.

It analysed 25 Petabytes of customer data and looked at four billion of the activities its users performed.

It found that its customer content grew by 61 percent year on year (YoY). However, hybrid content -- files stored in the cloud -- and on premise -- grew 83 percent YoY.

It also noticed that 41 percent of customer content resided in on-premise storage. Certain customers, that have enormous files, or large videos, have a requirement for a good on-premise storage option.

It also noticed that video files only accounted for one percent of total content quantity, but accounted for 20 percent of the volume in the stores.

It found that 22 percent of documents were stored, but these represented only 13 percent of storage.

When it looked at user activities, the data showed that over 61 percent of users access the web through Google Chrome. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is used by 18 percent of users, and Firefox trails at 12 percent.

However, 75 percent of users access data from a Windows desktop (25 percent through Mac OS). On mobile the dominant platform is iOS with 82 percent of users (18 percent Android) accessing data from their devices.

This analysis shows that businesses need to think about a hybrid strategy when considering the needs of their employees. A cloud-only solution might not be the best option in all use cases.

Deployed business solutions need to be device agnostic, working seamlessly across both Windows desktops and BYOD -- whether iOS or Android devices.

Workers are collaborating using the tools that work best for them. This might be Google Chrome, on-premise storage -- or a hybrid cloud solution.

Business needs to recognise the options that work best for its way of working -- and not be pushed down a one option -- one platform solution. It would be a solution that would certainly struggle to succeed.

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