Self Hosted Dropbox Alternative

The Dropbox Problem

Many businesses are now facing the Dropbox problem. Employees use it to back up work folders from work and simplify access from home, the airport and other remote locations. However, this scatters data across multiple devices and third-party locations, increasing the risk of data loss or non-compliance.

Challenges of Using Dropbox at Work

When business use Dropbox, they quickly discover that it's not ideal for business collaboration and file sharing for a variety of reasons:

Because of the differences between the two file repositories, there's a gap between collaboration on traditional file servers and Dropbox.
Replicating every file to all devices is expensive and consumes too much bandwidth.
Often, collaboration can't begin until full synchronization is complete and the user's PC hard drive capacity is too small for it.
No permissions are defined to replace or exploit NTFS and control file-level access. Thus, any file is accessible to anyone.
There is no file locking for collaboration between collaborators.
Third party interaction is required for troubleshooting as data isn't managed locally.

Many of them are now turning to you for a response. And since you already manage the IT infrastructure, you can answer these questions by self-hosting and managing a Dropbox alternative yourself, addressing these pain points:

EXPENSIVE DEVICES

File servers often have more data than a remote laptop with a small SSD can store.

DATA PRIVACY

Synchronizing every file with every device exposes every file regardless of its permissions.

DATA OWNERSHIP

You don't know where your data is after it's moved to Dropbox, as it could be on a third-party site or on a device where the user has logged into Dropbox and initiated a sync.

DATA SCATTERING

Some files reside on the original file server, but some revisions reside in Dropbox. Over time, you no longer know which copy is the most recent.

DATA SECURITY

There are no NTFS permissions or permission controls for Dropbox.

CENTRAL CONTROL

Dropbox distributes files to every device, making it difficult to manage from an enterprise perspective.

CentreStack Deployment Highlights

You can easily deploy Gladinet CentreStack on-premises to overcome the business challenges of using Dropbox in the workplace.

The self-hosted Dropbox alternative provides a file sharing and mobile access solution that can be hosted behind your corporate firewall, on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. At the same time, it leverages Active Directory permissions and gives end users a drive letter with on-demand access and file locking.

Businesses retain data privacy and ownership of their data and maintain existing access controls while enabling remote sharing and mobile access. It's the best of both worlds!

SIMPLE INSTALL

Install the solution on a Windows Server in 20 minutes.

MULTI-TENANT

CentreStack is multi-tenant by default. Single-tenancy is a simpler special case.

WHITE LABELED

Customize the solution with your own branding.

SCALABLE

Each CentreStack server supports thousands of users or can be clustered to create massive scale.

STORAGE AGNOSTIC

Use Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or file server shares to create a private, self-hosted Dropbox alternative.

DATA CENTER READY

Install it behind a company firewall or in Amazon or Azure data centers.

On-Premise Deployment Diagram

Install CentreStack on Windows 2016, Windows 2019 or Windows 2022 servers as shown below. Connect Active Directory (AD) and your local file server to the CentreStack instance.

The CentreStack server sits behind the corporate firewall and accepts incoming agent requests from port 443 (HTTPS), authenticates against the AD domain controller, and uses the resulting security token to control file access requests to internal file servers.

Benefits

CentreStack allows enterprises and service providers to create a Dropbox alternative on-premises or inside their data center with the following properties:

Integration with existing files and folders
Active Directory Identity Integration
Integration with existing NTFS Permissions

Native Active Directory & Home Directory Support

No additional setup is required to add Active Directory users to the solution. Active Directory users can simply log in to the on-premise file sync and share web portal and start using the solution. Active Directory is the central location for managing user identity. Optionally, the user's home directory can be used directly for access via web browsers and mobile devices.

Team Collaboration with On-Demand Synchronization

Integrate with file server, SAN, or NAS storage and directly import network share permission controls for team collaboration. Use on-demand synchronization for large collaboration folders and VDI environments where a full sync- based solution would not work well.