We’ve taken a couple of looks at ownCloud over the past few months. The company launched its signature cloud server software in April and issued a major update about a month ago. Today, ownCloud announced its iOS and Android apps, making the product a serious option for many businesses that need to develop a secure internal cloud strategy.
As we noted in April, the business and enterprise editions of ownCloud are open source-based and built around web standards. That means that a company can host a private cloud on virtually any web server including on-premise servers on a corporate network or using an external web host (including one of the companies that have partnered with ownCloud to offer hosting and other services).
At the end of June, the company announced a major update that expanded ownCloud’s enterprise functionality. That update included Active Directory and LDAP integration, enhanced system logs, file versioning and roll back (similar to OS X’s Versions feature), and a developer API and ownCloud extensions store.
Today, the company finally took one of the most important step in positioning ownCloud as a serious cloud storage option for business and enterprise environments: releasing mobile apps for iOS and Android.
With iOS and Android support, ownCloud offers a solution that can compete with personal cloud services like iCloud or Google Drive. It even can even go toe-to-toe with some public cloud providers that offer enterprise functionality like Box and Dropbox. All of which means that IT departments have a simple response when asked if they can deliver the same functionality as public services.
