The shift up the value chain among file synchronization providers has finally caught up to Egnyte Inc., which is joining the fray this morning with the launch of new reporting service that promises to provide customers with better insight into how and where their data is stored. The addition attempts to exploit its main advantage over the competition: Reach.

While Dropbox Inc. and Box Inc. have both greatly improved the file controls in their respective cloud storage platforms over the last few years, that functionality does not yet extend to the documents companies still keep behind the firewall for various security and logistical reasons. As a result, administrators are forced to use separate enforcement mechanisms for the on- and off-premise components of their collaboration infrastructure.

Egnyte attempts to bridge that disconnect with a file sharing platform that a customer can install on their own hardware and link up to a parallel implementation in the cloud to create a homogeneous storage environment across locations. That simplifies chores like ensuring access restrictions on a file are maintained as it’s moved around and, thanks to the new addition, monitoring as well.

The Smart Reporting and Auditing service promises to avoid the need for administrators to manually connect the dots between what’s happening in their on- and off-premise Egnyte deployments. A data aggregation component collects operational metrics from throughout an implementation that can be visualized to produce what the company touts as a complete picture of operations.

That can prove handy in all kinds of situations. For instance, an administrator could check the distribution of data in their organization to identify teams that are underusing cloud storage, or they might create a dashboard visualizing which branch offices access a particular folder the most and use that insight to move the data inside closer in order to reduce latency.

The launch of the service mirrors the efforts of Egnyte’s public cloud competitors, which have also focused on operationalizing the growing amounts of usage information at their disposal in their push to stand out from the pack. Box last year rolled out an entire set of metadata-based sorting features meant to help administrators enforce access controls more granularly.

Image via Egnyte