The Autonomy Mirage: Why CloudFS Gives You More Control and Lower Total Costs Than Egnyte

Moving Beyond the Illusion of Simplicity to Understand Where True Control and TCO Resides for Your Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Files 

Key Takeaways: 

• Unlike some solutions, CloudFS gives you direct ownership and management of your encryption keys and allows you to choose your own cloud provider, ensuring full data autonomy and avoiding vendor lock in. 

• CloudFS’s patented global block-level deduplication and compression drastically reduce cloud storage costs (up to 90%), WAN bandwidth, and egress fees. This often leads to a much lower TCO compared to Egnyte’s architecture. 
• CloudFS provides truly immutable global snapshots with a near-zero RPO (60 seconds) and fast RTO, offering superior ransomware protection and ensuring seamless integration with cloud services like AI without costly data movement. 

Many technologists have been captivated by fully managed content solutions for file management. However, it’s a mirage to believe you’ve achieved file management nirvana where your files are actually controlled by an unseen hand. 

As seasoned storage admins, sysadmins, and IT directors well know, the devil is in the details. A deeper look at these types of solutions often reveals a critical vulnerability. It comes down to the inherent architectural limitations of third-party-managed file solutions that potentially compromise your data autonomy and increase your overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 

Take a look at the realities of relying on third-party infrastructure for your core files. We invite you to re-evaluate who truly controls your file data and consider how Panzura CloudFS stands apart by putting you firmly in control, while maintaining a cloud-first posture and delivering hard-to-beat cost efficiency. 

Fully managed solutions like Egnyte simplify file access and collaboration by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. This can be great for basic file sharing like SharePoint. However, this simplification possibly comes at the cost of granular control over your data and can possibly lead to hidden, escalating costs. 

When “Simple” Means Less Control (and More Costs)  

Let’s start with encryption key management, which is a crucial aspect of control. When you store data with a third-party provider, who manages the encryption keys? While it’s true that some, often higher-tier, managed service providers now offer the use of industry-standard key management solutions that ensure that keys are in control of the customer, not the service provider, the default for many fully managed solutions, including Egnyte, is that their encryption keys are managed by the vendor. 

This means you must trust a third party with the ultimate control over access to your sensitive data. Even if advanced options like Enterprise Key Management (EKM) are available from some SaaS vendors, these are typically an opt-in feature for higher tiers, adding complexity and not representing the fundamental, “by design” architectural approach to data sovereignty. If you cannot directly manage your own keys, you inherently lose a layer of data sovereignty and direct oversight. 

Going deeper, there are other aspects of control that you need to think about: 

• Limited Cloud Choice and Vendor Lock-In: Many solutions are built on a specific cloud provider’s infrastructure. While they might allow you to bring your own cloud storage, the underlying service often remains tied to their chosen ecosystem. 

For example, users often discover that some providers primarily leverage a specific cloud for core infrastructure. This can lead to vendor lock in, limiting your flexibility to choose the cloud provider that best fits your needs, pricing models, or geographic requirements. It restricts your ability to diversify your cloud strategy or negotiate better rates with other providers, which can directly impact your cloud spend. 

• Vendor-Dictated Terms for Future Services & Exploding Egress Fees: The future of data lies in leveraging future services like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). If your data resides within a managed platform, your ability to integrate with cutting-edge AI and ML services, for example, is often dictated by that vendor’s roadmap and partnerships. 

While Egnyte offers various integrations, directly feeding datasets from their proprietary system into a hyperscaler’s native AI and ML services can be complex and potentially incurs significant egress fees, as your data might need to be moved out of their managed environment. This can slow down innovation and inflate costs if you’re forced to move data or rely on a vendor’s specific, potentially limited, AI offerings. 

• Migration Headaches: Deciding to move away from a managed solution can be daunting. Your data might be stored in proprietary formats or managed in ways that complicate extraction and migration, leading to significant time, effort, and potential costs for data egress, conversion, and re-ingestion. 

From our perspective, while they offer undeniable ease of use for general file sharing, managed solutions can fundamentally compromise your long-term data strategy by placing critical controls (and intellectual property) outside your direct purview (and with likely no backup), often leading to a higher, less predictable TCO. 

Control and Cost Efficiency with CloudFS 

CloudFS shatters the control mirage by giving you unparalleled, autonomous control and flexibility over your unstructured file data. It’s built on a fundamentally different architectural principle – your data, your cloud, your control. And critically, it’s designed from the ground up to minimize your cloud infrastructure and operational costs, even on the major hyperscalers. 

Some might worry that using a major public cloud (like AWS or Azure) for infrastructure is inherently far more expensive than self-managing your own data center or using smaller IaaS providers. While raw infrastructure costs might appear lower in certain niche or on-premises scenarios, such comparisons often fail to account for the true Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for enterprise-grade file systems. 

Again, let’s start with the matter of encryption keys. With Panzura CloudFS, you own and manage your encryption keys. Your “golden copy” of data resides in your chosen cloud object storage, encrypted with keys that you control. This level of direct control is a big differentiator compared to fully managed solutions that manage keys on your behalf. We invite you to compare CloudFS and believe you will find it offers a superior security posture for sensitive data. 

As to true multi-cloud and hybrid cloud flexibility, CloudFS is the clear choice for control because it’s cloud agnostic. Your data lives in standard object storage – AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, IBM COS, Cloudian, and many others – in bucket (or buckets) you own. You can easily access cloud services — including AI/ML services — offered by another cloud provider, by standing up a virtual Panzura node in a convenient cloud region. Consider what this truly means to your file data control: 

• No Vendor Lock-In: You are free to choose the hyperscaler or private cloud that best suits your needs, and you can even switch providers if your strategy or pricing requires it. Your CloudFS file system exists independently of any single cloud vendor, allowing you to leverage competitive cloud pricing and avoid vendor-imposed surcharges. 

• Strategic Cloud Placement & Data Residency: You can place your data in the cloud region closest to your users or processing needs, optimizing performance and compliance with specific data residency requirements like GDPR, knowing exactly where your data resides. 

• Access to Best-Fit Services: You don’t need to undertake large-scale data movement, or change cloud storage provider, to utilize cloud provider-hosted AI services. For example, data stored in Azure Blob can easily be surfaced to Amazon Rekognition, without making copies. 

• Hybrid by Design: Whether you need data on-premises, in the cloud, or a mix of both, CloudFS provides a unified, global namespace, allowing your teams both in the office and working remotely to access files as if they were local, regardless of where the data physically resides, with or without a VPN. This inherent flexibility is a significant advantage over managed solutions that may offer hybrid capabilities but operate within their prescribed cloud environments. 

Moreover, CloudFS is designed for the future. Since your “golden copy” of data resides in standard object storage – the preferred landing zone for cloud-native AI and ML services –  if your AI and ML processing is happening within the same cloud region as your CloudFS-managed object storage, you often incur zero egress fees for data consumption by those services. 

Your data is already there, ready for analysis, eliminating costly and time-consuming data movement. This direct integration and cost efficiency for AI and ML workflows offers a substantial advantage over fully managed solutions, which may require data duplication or egress to integrate with external AI services. You’re not tied to any single cloud provider offerings, and you can switch providers based on evolving needs. 

Beyond control, CloudFS is designed for extreme efficiency, delivering a dramatically lower TCO. Its patented global block-level deduplication and compression happens before data leaves your local appliance for the cloud. 

• If the same file or even parts of a file exist across multiple global offices, Panzura stores its composite data blocks only once in your cloud object storage. 

• This dramatically reduces wide area network (WAN) bandwidth usage and lowers your cloud storage costs. 

• CloudFS’s global deduplication provides a more significant reduction in data footprint, cloud storage costs, and WAN traffic compared to solutions that primarily deduplicate at a local or single-instance level. 

Imagine storing 10,000TB of unique data, but due to CloudFS’s intelligent data reduction, you may only pay for 1,000TB or even less of raw cloud object storage. This translates directly to up to a 90% reduction in your monthly cloud storage bill. This means CloudFS makes your infrastructure costs on major hyperscalers a fraction of what they would be with unoptimized solutions, effectively countering the notion that hyperscalers are inherently too expensive for file storage when the full TCO is considered. This level of efficiency leads to a much lower TCO. 

Finally, let’s look at ransomware, malware, and overall data loss resilience and recovery. While some providers offer security, CloudFS offers inherent architectural resilience. CloudFS creates immutable global snapshots of your entire global file system as frequently as every 60 seconds. These snapshots are truly immutable – they cannot be overwritten, altered, or deleted, even by the most sophisticated ransomware. 

This delivers a near-zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – you risk losing no more than 60 seconds of data, globally. With rapid Recovery Time Objective (RTO) capabilities, you can recover your entire global file system in minutes, not hours or days. We invite you to compare CloudFS’s RPO and RTO capabilities with any other file management solution, and we believe you will discover our recovery times are the fastest in the industry. 

The Ultimate Choice: Control and Value 

The allure of managed “simplicity” can often mask underlying complexities and costs that emerge at scale or when business needs evolve. While Egnyte provides a service for content collaboration, its architecture, centered on file synchronization and a vendor-managed cloud, may not provide the full data sovereignty, multi-cloud flexibility, and future readiness you need. Crucially, we believe you will find that it lacks the architectural efficiencies to dramatically reduce your cloud spend, leading to a higher effective cost of ownership. 

Don’t let marketing fluff cloud your judgment. The ability to control your encryption keys, choose your cloud provider, and directly integrate with cutting-edge services without exorbitant egress fees are foundational elements of control. Equally vital are the inherent efficiencies that drastically reduce your cloud infrastructure costs and overall TCO. 

Put it all together and we think you’ll agree. Panzura CloudFS is a strategic platform that puts you squarely in control of your file data. Again, we invite you to compare the differences, the TCO advantages, and the unparalleled data ownership offered by CloudFS. We are convinced you’ll discover that CloudFS is the superior option, empowering you to innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and secure your future. 

Get in touch now. Let’s talk about how CloudFS is the right choice for your file data management. 

This blog is part of a 4-part series exploring the differences between CloudFS and Egnyte for file management. Read the other blogs in the series here: 

• Beyond Backup: How Built-in Resilience and Recovery with CloudFS Outperforms Egnyte  

• TCO Reality Check: Why CloudFS Delivers Superior Cost Optimization Versus Egnyte

• The Sync Trap: CloudFS Delivers Immediate Access and Collaboration Where Egnyte Falls Short 

*All product and company names are trademarks or registered® trademarks of their respective holders. Use of those names does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by their owners. The opinions expressed above are solely those of Panzura LLC as of July 24, 2025, and Panzura LLC makes no commitment to update these opinions after such date.