... Rooney acknowledges that providing those tools across an entire enterprise is much more complex.
Explains Huddle ceo Alastair Mitchell: “Enterprises have to sync not just an individual’s data, but that of everyone across the organization and make it securely available offline on multiple devices.
“Consumer sync tools lack the security, scalability and intelligence required for the enterprise. They’re a time bomb of costly data loss waiting to happen. What Huddle has done is to take a simple computing technique, a shared drive, and brought it up to date.
“A shared drive is a shared space on the network where everyone can post their files. Most companies have them. But if you are outside the [corporate] firewall you can’t access it. What people then do is to use their personal email, or perhaps other tools which are designed for individuals, not enterprises.”
Effectively what Huddle has done is to put a shared drive in the cloud. Users can see all of the data on the drive, but the system only downloads onto a user’s laptop or tablet the files that he or she needs to work on.
Asks blogger Rooney rhetorically: "How does it do that?" In reply, he quotes ceo Mitchel verbatim.
“We figure out what is the most important information to you. We use learning algorithms to determine what you need. It uses the same concepts as Autonomy. It learns who you are, who you are working with, what workspaces you have access to, which folders you use, and who you work with.
“It works out those documents you need based on that. In the background it pushes it to your device encrypted, so that when you get on your plane and you need to work on, say, a spreadsheet, it is already on your iPad.”
All data is encrypted and the system has a remote wipe capability so that should a device be lost, data can be deleted and access denied.
The system, which recently received clearance from the UK government to handle official classified data, launched this week (21-Feb-12) in public beta.