Over the holidays, I enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with the Infrascale team to discuss its FileLocker cloud service. This team has been a “true” member of the SMB community having grown up with the rest of us and earning a positive reputation. The company has its SOS Online Backup solution for SOHOs and FileLocker, the public and private cloud collaboration for small business and enterprise (which is the focus of this article).
The end of the story is this. FileLocker is a channel-friendly document storage/sharing/collaboration tool that competes with many other offerings (e.g.DropBox, ShareFile and even SharePoint in Office 365) with a security superiority and ease of use.
Ken Shaw Jr., CEO at Infrascale, is a “Channel Guy” who has hit all the right notes. Its business model is driven 75 percent by MSPs to resell and support its solutions. That’s more than 1,000 MSPs of which 80+ are in North America. The average MSP practice has a couple hundred customers resulting in a few thousand end points.” Shaw shared. “And we promote white-labeling so our solutions appear to be from the MSP itself.” Partners are taking notice at the margins offered by Infrascale. It has up to 40 percent margins as demonstrated by the simple math. A $5 customer for FileLocker is using an account purchased by the MSP for $3, and the delta of $2 is a 40 percent margin! You can view the site, www.filelocker.com, to learn how pricing improves with larger customer sizes.
During our discussion, Shaw especially wanted to highlight the security features of FileLocker. It is encrypted end-to-end, which makes it distinctive in a crowded field. Using three tiers of encryption, FileLocker encrypts your files before it send over the cloud (where the files remain encrypted). The host provides military grade encryption where the data is encrypted again.
We then discussed mobility. According to Shaw, FileLocker is desktop, web and mobile ready. “You have access to your stuff anywhere…share your stuff with others…securely…” he commented.
FileLocker is ready for both public and private cloud. Close behind is value. A free 25GB trail for five users is perfect for the small business customer to test drive. In fact, I’m currently testing FileLocker to see if it’s truly easier to configure than SharePoint, and also plan to use it for collaboration between our editorial team members (you can see this in the figure above). I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
