ownCloud Hits New Milestones: How You Can Get Going With It
The ever popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has reached some remarkable new milestones. You can move beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, and you don't have to have your files sitting on servers that you don't choose, governed by people you don't know.
Now, ownCloud Inc. has announced that is has achieved 100% year-over-year growth in 2015 with its open source platform, and is on track to double that growth again in 2016. "For 2016, ownCloud is already on track to double bookings to more than $16 million," the company reports. "Today, it has more than 300 customers across 47 countries, with downloads of the community and enterprise edition in 193 countries supporting more than 8 million users." Here are more details, and info on how you can leverage ownCloud.
Analyst firm Gartner recently published research that supports the customer demand for open, secure file sharing solutions that offer deep integration:
“Proprietary cloud storage repositories, which initially drove the success of personal cloud services and also characterized EFSS offerings, will increasingly be perceived by organizations as rigid and captive. Most IT buyers instead will look for flexibility of deployment and integration between existing data repositories and those in the cloud.”
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing, Monica Basso, Charles Smulders, Jeffrey Mann, 22 July 2015
"Our unique ability to offer secure, flexible Universal File Access puts us head and shoulders ahead of the competition, particularly in a changing regulatory environment,” said Markus Rex, CEO of ownCloud. “Our unique capability to securely break data silos while ensuring data privacy will fuel remarkable worldwide growth for us in 2016.”
Here are updated resources for getting going with ownCloud, literally in minutes.
The FLOSS Manuals ownCloud Guide. As we've reported, FLOSS Manuals' guide to ownCloud is completely free, and a good starting point. Before diving into it, you may want to gain some familiarity with what ownCloud is, which we covered here. The FLOSS Manuals guide is aimed to be a complement to the existing documentation at http://doc.owncloud.org. It has sections on how to share files, calendars, contacts and more in the cloud, and optimize security. There is a whole section on SysAdmin tools, which makes experimenting with ownCloud easy.
Leverage the Pi. In this post, you can get easy instructions for running ownCloud with a Raspberry Pi device. Very cool.
ownCloud on Linux. There are many good tutorials available for running ownCloud on Linux. Linux User & Developer has a good one here, and Ubuntu users can find an easy tutorial here.
Video Tutorials. For some people, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the good news is that there are lots of video tutorials that help you set ownCloud up in minutes. You can find lots of them on YouTube, including specialized ones that can get you going with applications in the cloud.
Twitter Resources. You can keep up with social postings surrounding ownCloud on Twitter, either through the official channel https://twitter.com/ownCloud or the community channel: https://twitter.com/ownClouders.
Forums. Finally, ownCloud has lots of useful forums that you can dive into for more resources. There are many specialized tutorials on the forums. Starting here is a good first step.
Go Mobile. Don't forget that there are mobile clients for ownCloud, which can help you get much more out of the platform. With these clients, you can remotely access an ownCloud server, browse your files, download assets and more.
The nice thing about having your ownCloud deployment in place is that you can access files and applications from anywhere. You also control the security of your setup, and you don't have to worry about security breaches. Hopefully, you'll find some good resources for getting started here.