Amazon Zocalo: Managed Enterprise Storage and Sharing Service

Amazon Web Services, Inc. announced  Zocalo, a managed enterprise storage and sharing service with administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity.

With this customers can store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files – from the device of their choice.

Over the last several years, enterprise document and collaboration systems have tried to be too many things to users, and ended up becoming overly complex and expensive for both users and IT organizations. This is especially true as it relates to document and file storage, sharing, and feedback. As a result, enterprises are left with the unfortunate choice of using email to share documents and files (which is simple to send, but not secure nor easy to keep organized) or suffer with the status quo, work around the complexity and high cost, and hope alternatives are made available. Zocalo makes it easy for users to share and gather feedback through a central tool and with a consistent experience on the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets. It can integrate with existing corporate directories, and provides administrators with flexible sharing rules, audit logs, and control of the location where data is stored. For a monthly fee, it provides a managed service so customers can provide secure file storage and sharing capabilities to their users.

“Customers have told us that they’re fed up with the cost, complexity, and performance of their existing old guard enterprise document and collaboration management tools,” said Noah Eisner, GM, Amazon Zocalo, AWS. “AWS was increasingly being asked to provide an enterprise storage and sharing tool that was easy to use, allowed users to quickly collaborate with others, and met the strict security needs of their organizations. That’s what Amazon Zocalo was built to do.“

Zocalo offers the following benefits to users:

• Easy sharing: Zocalo lets users share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files with others.

• Access from any device: Users can access data stored in Zocalo and view and leave feedback anywhere, anytime, from the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets. It can sync files across devices to ensure files are available anywhere, anytime.

• Feedback: Users can request and manage feedback from others, and contributors can highlight any word, sentence, paragraph, or area of a document or file and leave feedback. It also notifies contributors and document owners about review activities and approaching deadlines via email.

• Central file hub: It provides users with a central location for both the documents and files they are reviewing as well as those they own and are soliciting feedback on. With all these files in one location, reviewers have access to all of the related feedback in a single web view, making reading or contributing comments as simple as a few clicks.

• Available with Amazon WorkSpaces: WorkSpaces, AWS’s virtual desktop in the cloud service, is integrated with Zocalo. All WorkSpaces customers get Amazon Zocalo for free (with up to 50GB of storage).

Zocalo offers the following benefits to administrators:

• Security: All data stored is encrypted in transit and at rest, and administrators can set policies to control users’ sharing behavior, choose the AWS region where users’ data is stored, and view audit logs to track file and user activity.

• Integration with corporate directory: It can integrate with an organization’s existing Active Directory, meaning that end users can continue to use their existing enterprise credentials to access Zocalo.

• Cost: Priced at $5 per user per month, including 200GB of storage. For WorkSpaces customers, Zocalo is free up to 50GB of storage, and $2 per user per month for up to 200GB of storage. With Zocalo there is no hardware to purchase and maintain and no software to deploy; administrators simply enable the service for their organization and invite users.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. is a provider of investor communications and technology-driven-solutions to banks, broker-dealers, mutual funds, and corporations globally. “Business document sharing is an important element in our employees’ abilities to get their job done,” said Robert Krugman, VP, digital strategy, Broadridge. “Amazon Zocalo makes documents easier to share, more flexible to access and review, and easier to finalize. This type of functionality is very exciting, enabling employees, companies, and customers-like investors and advisors-to quickly collaborate within and across teams to get work done faster.“