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
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4 min read
Peter Haendler
:
Jul 24, 2025
Table of Contents
Harnessing the Power of CloudFS for Unmatched Resilience and Rapid Recovery for Your Hybrid Cloud File Data
Key Takeaways:
Ransomware groups launch attacks every 2 seconds and 91% of attacks now include data exfiltration. Traditional backup and recovery methods are failing organizations who use content management platforms which may not measure up to the threat landscape. While solutions like Egnyte offer basic snapshot capabilities, for instance, their perceived resilience might not withstand the brutal reality of many sophisticated cyber threats.
The main question isn’t whether you’ll face a ransomware attack. It’s whether your data architecture can withstand one and if it can, how quickly you can recover. Panzura CloudFS stands apart by going beyond traditional security to deliver powerful data resilience, with a sub-60 second global recovery point objective (RPO), through immutable architecture and immutable snapshots. Moreover, real-time ransomware detection with automatic interdiction provides early warnings and containment-based defense against ransomware, slashing time to recovery by minimizing damage.
Many solutions rely on traditional backup solutions and snapshots taken at infrequent intervals to support business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) requirements. For instance, Egnyte users often report typical snapshots at intervals like every 4 hours and require a separate BC/DR solution. While Egnyte’s architecture includes multi-data center redundancy and local caching with cloud failover, its primary automatic snapshot frequency for recent data is indeed every 4 hours.
While 4-hour snapshot intervals are better than nothing, this can potentially leave a gaping window of vulnerability. In a ransomware attack, losing up to four hours of critical data could be catastrophic, costing millions in lost productivity, data recovery efforts, and reputational damage.
This means up to four hours of data could still be lost in a full system rollback, a stark contrast to CloudFS’s near-zero RPO.
Consider, for example, the monetary value of losing 4 hours of work in a company of 100 active designers, engineers, or architects billing at an average of $300 per hour is more than the cost of an annual subscription to over 150 TB of CloudFS, which does 60-second intervals (or upon deltas).
On the other hand, CloudFS detects ransomware in near real-time and automatically interdicts it by disconnecting affected user accounts. Administrators are then alerted and provided with a comprehensive tracker detailing the files, folders, and users involved, to aid rapid investigation.
Even with snapshots, recovery from a major incident like a ransomware attack can be laborious, requiring significant IT resources to investigate and manually restore files. The longer the attack is allowed to run, the more damage there can be to sift through. This human delay factor can amplify the financial impact of a breach. CloudFS’s audit and recovery capabilities streamline investigation and recovery to minimize impact to business. With CloudFS, snapshot restoration involves moving only lightweight metadata pointers, accelerating time to clean data, and our global support team is on hand around the clock to provide guidance and assistance.
For data at the edge, CloudFS’s sub-five-minute failover capability aims for near-instantaneous resumption of operations in the event of a node failure or interruption. Instant Node provides high availability for cached data and file operations without requiring dedicated infrastructure standing idle. This can be used to maintain continuity in the face of sudden, unexpected outages such as power failures or to seamlessly mitigate the impact of incoming weather events. It fundamentally reduces the human delay factor and RTO compared to any restoration-based approach.
Egnyte’s “smart cache” offers a good local speed boost and enhances collaboration for large files within connected office environments. However, it doesn’t necessarily change the fundamental challenge of moving massive, unique datasets efficiently across a truly global file system without relying on local caching as the primary mechanism for efficiency. Data at the edge can be more vulnerable to damage, before it reaches an object store, in which it can be immutable. The longer data remains at the edge, the greater the exposure.
Furthermore, while Egnyte’s security features, including malware scanning and zero-day anomaly detection, are designed to address general threats and detect ransomware, they might not offer the same inherent architectural resilience needed to truly withstand modern, sophisticated ransomware attacks that target even the recovery points themselves, as CloudFS’s immutable snapshots do.
CloudFS is built from the ground up to address these challenges. It offers enterprise-grade, scalable resilience against ransomware, malware, and accidental data loss. While Egnyte and others offer reasonable security features, the CloudFS approach to file data resilience and recovery is baked into its architecture and typically seen as superior due to its immutable snapshots and disaster recovery capabilities. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2025 Radar, Hybrid Cloud Storage, CloudFS has the best RPO, at under 60 seconds, globally.
For businesses where every minute of downtime is unacceptable, or where data integrity against advanced threats is paramount – for instance, IP in design firms or sensitive research data – the built-in resilience of Panzura CloudFS is a clear and distinct advantage. It drastically reduces the financial impact of downtime and allows technologists to rapidly restore clean data by reverting to clean snapshots. It’s that simple.
Learn how CloudFS stacks up against Egnyte with significant real-world implications for workforce collaboration, data resilience, and enterprise-class scalability.
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:
*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.
Director of Product Management at Panzura. Nearly 2 decades experience in IT and ops for both the public and private sectors.
Moving Beyond the Illusion of Simplicity to Understand Where True Control and TCO Resides for Your Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Files
Harnessing the Power of CloudFS for Unmatched Resilience and Rapid Recovery for Your Hybrid Cloud File Data
Go Beyond the Buzzwords to Uncover the Hidden Costs and Real TCO Advantages That Make CloudFS the Smarter Investment