Imagine a scenario when you’re sitting in your office in LA, and you have your manufacturing unit in Philadelphia and marketing teams and business partners in every continent and clients all over the world. A change in product design or order has occurred, and you wish to send this information to your teams, and departmental heads, but NOT to all. A remote server and FTP? Email? Think again.

Enter Egnyte cloud computing. This is an online, on-demand file sharing service that puts you (the ‘power user’) in charge of who gets what. The interface is quite straight forward. When you sign up, you get an on-demand file server for your account accessible through a unique web address, which you may even customize this secure URL with your company logo.

Egnyte then lets you create a full hierarchy for all your documents on the server. All the users created by you can log into this account (whether in the office or on the move and even from a mobile device), and you decide who gets access to what folders and files by assigning permissions. You can also lock files to prevent them from being modified or deleted.

Power users can also access the folder directly from a desktop application provided by Egnyte — which means you open your Explorer and rename, move or delete your files and folders which will be automatically mapped to your Egnyte server, which again means the changes will be there all to see who log in from their Web browser. And no more renaming of files for each version with every change to keep track — Egnyte creates versions as files change.

Also called Egnyte Local Cloud (ELC) is an easily installable on your computer hard drive or shelf storage (external) devices. Yet another great feature of this service is the off-line access to your files. When you’re not online, you can still work on your files, and once you get your connection, ELC synchronizes your new, modified files to your on-demand file server. Plus, there’s a useful back-up configuration that lets you take back-ups of your entire computer or selected folders at pre-determined times or intervals.

And, by the way, in case you were wondering, ‘cloud computing’ comes from the familiar image that we’ve been seeing all along — that of a cloud used to represent the Internet. Perhaps also goes to suggest that we don’t care what goes on out there so long as we get the service we need — on demand. Which Egnyte does extremely efficiently.