Dropbox-like service for enterprise users

There is a significant movement to public clouds, but security and control are paramount for enterprises.

ParaBlu's Blu-Cloud is a Dropbox for theenterprise. It allows you to share and collaborate with team members across geographic locations, to access files on any of your devices, create backups, and makes possible full content search. All of this is done extremely securely, because the content remains in your premises and fully within your control. 

There is a significant movement to public clouds, but security and control are paramount for enterprises, and so most remain wary of public clouds for a lot of their operations. Dropbox, for instance, is a public cloud that is shared by all its millions of users. That's not a comfortable thought for enterprises. 

That's where Blu-Cloud comes in. It is an on-premise solution, one that works entirely within the firewalls of your company. It's completely agnostic to hardware and devices and therefore works anywhere. And it's simple to use: Blu-Cloud is a hardware appliance that plugs into your router and creates a personal cloud for you in under a minute, says the company founder Kameswaran Subramanian. 

Subramanian grew up in Tamil Nadu, completed BTech in computer science from Amrita Institute of Technology in 1999, worked in IBM, Bosch and Nokia, and was part of a startup developing a product for Swiss banks, before he started ParaBlu in Bangalore with seed funding from friends and family. 

"I love building products," says Subramanian. But he admits it has been challenging. Getting the kind of team required to build a product is expensive. Sales people who understand the ecosystem are also expensive . "Such people are in large MNCs drawing huge salaries that we can't afford," he says. So instead of building his own sales team, he recently tied up with a channel partner. 

Subramanian says his solution works significantly better than some competing offerings.Microsoft, for instance , provides a solution, but it requires the combination of its Share-Point and SkyDrive. "Also, their performance is bad when dealing with large files or a large number of files. On the other hand, our customers tell us that Blu-Cloud handles even large CAD/CAM drawings very well," he says. 

Recently, ParaBlu added the functionality of creating mini-clouds within the larger cloud, so that smaller teams or departments within a company could have their own secure clouds. 

Vikram Pawar of iFocus Systec, a software testing and software product engineering services company that uses Blu-Cloud , says he would give the solution a 4.5 on 5.

"We have multiple clients in testing, and we assign separate miniclouds for each team that handles a client so that none has access to the other clients' information. It's very easy to use and has better encryption than Dropbox," Pawar says.