Egnyte, a Silicon Valley-based file sharing specialist, announced a major update to its flagship offering this week. The company is touting a new feature that allows users of its EgnytePlus platform to easily integrate cloud services into their environments without having to worry about the plumbing.

EgnytePlus is a data management framework that stores information in three differently optimized tiers: Replication, Archive and Sharing. Third party services are plugged into the latter, so that data can be moved back and forth from the cloud to the data center without being fully replicated first. User permissions are respected, too, which means customers don’t have to spend precious man-hours on unnecessary sorting and filtering.

The firm says that Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure and NetApp GRID are supported on launch.  Additional platforms may be added later on.

“Businesses need a combination of choice and control – choice of local storage or type of cloud, and control over what files live where. Since not all files are the same, they cannot be treated in the same way,” said Vineet Jain, Egnyte’s CEO. “It’s a fact that the overwhelming majority of Fortune 500 companies use multiple on-premise storage vendors and at least one cloud storage provider. Egnyte has the only file sharing solution available to give enterprises the choice and control across their diverse storage environments.”

By giving enterprises more choice and control, Egnyte is making it much more cost-efficient to extend legacy infrastructure to the cloud.

Last month, a company called Druva announced its own multi-tiered enterprise management  platform. The private cloud solution includes several components, including mobile backup, file sharing and encryption. There’s also an analytics tool that displays data in visualized dashboards suited for both admins and executives.

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