Companies can use a unified storage management system to index and manage data across their organisations, including data in public cloud services, such as DropBox, company servers and employee devices, while enabling companies to deploy shared documents among team members and across various devices, says cloud storage management company Storage Made Easy chairperson Ian Osborne.

“Access to data anywhere and at any time is important to enhance the usability of the data. Unification of data across corporate storage, whether private cloud storage, public cloud storage or a hybrid model, is important in most companies where data is distributed across various storage systems.”

The company’s unified storage system enables users to access data ubiquitously from all distributed storage sites and devices using a single viewing panel, enabling the users to search all email addresses, attachments, devices, cloud services and corporate hard disks and servers for documents related to an employee’s work function.

Companies can also keep track of their business data and core corporate data assets by monitoring all file events when using the system, giving a complete historic view of events on data access.

Accessing documents quickly and easily, without being forced to remember on which hard disk or storage service they are, improves efficiency for workers and the accessibility of data for mobile workers and workflows on shared documents.

“Our unified data storage system also enables multiple users to access and collabo- rate on a single document, with mark-ups and changes visible to users. With the increased use of public cloud services and the use of personal email services in business environments, there is a need for companies to have a single system to administrate and control company data.”

Further, the unified storage system enables companies to keep version-tracked changes of documents and files while enabling these to be hidden from end-user access-clients so that users always see the most recent draft, but have access to previous versions if required.

“Using our system, companies can see exactly who made changes to a document and who is working on it. “Companies can also determine the workflows that must be applied to different documents,” says Osborne.

Storage Made Easy enables companies to protect against data sprawl and data leaks, even from employee email addresses and public storage services, as companies can use the system to manage their data exposure and to ensure and monitor that users only access documents pertaining to their work function.

“The system also helps to manage the movement of sensitive documents across the business, as files can be encrypted prior to being placed on the data storage server, and even unencrypted documents can be password-protected and access set to expire after a limited period,” says Osborne.

Collaboration groups can also be established for temporary work, for example, establishing an engineering work group for a single project, with only users in the group accessing the data. These users can be inside or outside the company, and the storage medium for shared documents becomes irrelevant as the documents that are shared can be stored anywhere.

“Our goal with Storage Made Easy is to enable companies to deal with data storage sprawl, control their data, and manage the anarchy that cloud services introduce to corporate data,” concludes Osborne.

The company offers a free 14-day trial of its system from its website.