Enterprise vs. Consumer Cloud – Does it Matter?

Typically when people think about the cloud and what it has to offer, they picture a vast, amorphous thing in which everything is basically the same, but that’s not the reality. Just as all cars aren’t created equal – a BMW luxury sedan is not the same as a Ford Fiesta, for example – applications in the cloud are different in some important ways.

Cloud applications can be broken into two broad categories: 1) Consumer, or prosumer (for the “professional consumer”) and 2) Enterprise. For the sake of this discussion we’ll focus on file sharing and collaboration applications in these categories.

So what’s the difference, and does it really matter?

Consumer applications are typically low-cost, mass-market solutions, usually available in both free and inexpensive premium versions. The main goal of consumer solutions is to simplify tasks such as file and photo sharing on a limited, low-volume basis.

Enterprise solutions are more robust, with strong emphasis on privacy, security and reliability, and can be customized for specific environments. They are designed for heavy-usage patterns, such as large files and high volumes.

If you’re sharing or collaborating on non-sensitive, non-confidential files with a small number of people — whether it’s an internal team or a small number of external trading partners — and you’re looking for a free or low-cost solution, then a consumer application may be the right choice.

It’s safe to say that within the right circumstances, applications like Google Docs, Dropbox and YouSendIt can be used to great effect by small businesses.

However, if you need reliability, or if the information you’re sharing is confidential, these consumer solutions may be a poor choice. Consumer applications support some level of data encryption, but they do not provide the right level of security for most enterprises. Nor do they provide chain-of-custody information — that is, a receipt proving that the recipient you sent the data to actually received it, when they received it, and that only they received it. This type of audit trail is required by regulations worldwide.

If your business handles confidential data such as patient health information (PHI), which is subject to strict privacy regulations, you require the capability to control and record who has access to the information at all times. Consumer applications typically do not provide this level of sophisticated security and control, mainly because it is not required by the mass market of casual users they target. Similarly, reliability and high availability are not requirements for most consumer-grade applications in the cloud. For example, if you cannot access and upload photos of your dog at a certain time, it isn’t a big issue.

On the other hand, for enterprises and large organizations that have to guarantee file transfers and information exchange, it is a big issue. Reliability and availability are not guaranteed with consumer applications – in fact, if you look at the Dropbox or YouSendIt terms of service, you’ll see that whether you pay for the service or not, availability is simply not guaranteed.

Companies like Axway, which offers an MFT Service in the cloud as an enterprise solution, promise 99.9% availability in their SLAs, guaranteeing your information is available, accessible, and where it’s supposed to be.

Regarding throughput and performance, again, consumer applications are designed for less-critical, less-robust use. Business users may send two or three files per week successfully, or share a document that’s accessed four or five times per day using these services, but large files are just not handled sufficiently.

Enterprise customers can share multi-gigabyte files, such as CAD/CAM engineering schematics, via services like Axway’s MFT Service in the cloud. These enterprise applications are designed to handle thousands of file transfers per hour, and very large files as well. Axway also provides best-in-class technology such as large enterprise clustering (LEC) and file-transfer accelerators which are built into the cloud technology to support enterprise-sized needs.

Not all applications in the cloud are created equal. In scenarios where security, non-repudiation, availability and performance matter, it’s time to look beyond the consumer applications to enterprise-grade applications. Otherwise, you may end up with a service that looks good on the surface, but in the end does not meet your needs and even causes damage – such as data leaks or unmet SLAs with your customers. Go straight to the applications and services that are going to provide the capabilities and performance you need, and don’t settle for less.

(This post was first published at http:blogs.axway.com)