ownCloud Enterprise 7 Adds Object Storage, Broader File Sharing for Personal Cloud

Making data sharing and syncing available no matter where the data lives—on private clouds, in apps or in public clouds such as AWS and Dropbox—is the headline feature in ownCloud Enterprise 7, the newest version of the cloud and data storage platform built on top of the open source ownCloud project.

ownCloud Enterprise 7, which was released this week with pricing starting at $9,000 annually for a 50-user subscription, is designed to provide "a common file access layer across an organization, whether the data resides on internal servers, on object storage, in applications like SharePoint or Jive, other ownClouds, or even external cloud systems such as Dropbox, Google, and Amazon," ownCloud said in a statement.

That functionality, which the company calls Universal File Access, complements the server-to-server file sharing and syncing features that were already available in ownCloud, making it possible for users of one ownCloud installation to share files with those on another installation without relying on shared links in the Dropbox fashion.

ownCloud hopes the ability of its latest enterprise platform to support seamless sharing of files no matter where they are stored, or who the recipient is, will help distinguish the product in a cloud ecosystem where there is no shortage of other syncing and sharing solutions. "Organizations have spent years building complex, heterogeneous IT environments to support their business processes," said Markus Rex, CEO of ownCloud. "And now, with the introduction of public clouds and consumer-grade file sync and share apps it just gets more complex—a real unstructured data mess adding complexity and cost as well as the potential for serious security and privacy disasters. ownCloud offers IT the ability to give employees quick and easy access to their files—no matter where they reside—and provides a data management layer allowing IT to maintain complete policy based control and integrating with the tools and processes they already have."

Other notable features in ownCloud Enterprise 7 include better integration with data stored on Windows network drives, as well as support for accessing object-store data from OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3. And beyond this, the full list of new features is available here.