Amazon Zocalo Offers Enterprise Data Storage and Collaboration

Amazon has released a new Limited Preview called Zocalo. Zocalo is a secure storage facility within Amazon Web Services (AWS), much like those offered by Box, Dropbox and others, that is designed for Enterprises.

Priced at $5 per user per month, the service provides 200GB of storage for each user, and it integrates with on-premises Active Directory, allowing business users to utilize existing corporate credentials to access the service.

Obviously, Zocalo is served by a web site for storage and interaction, but it also promotes "access and sync from any device," though available apps only support iPad, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets. This sounds great initially, but when you consider that Amazon is targeting this new service toward business users and the majority of the world doesn’t use a tablet to get actual work done, it doesn't make a lot of sense. That last thing I want to do is to close my laptop lid and pull my tablet out of my bag just to use the service using an app. To fix this, Amazon is releasing desktop sync applications for Windows and Mac OS X that are very similar to how OneDrive functions. It syncs a selected folder tree on the local computer with Zocalo. The desktop sync application is only available to run on Windows 7 (not Windows 8) and Mac OS X 10.7 or later.

Management for the stored files is centralized in the AWS Management Console. Files types supported consist of Microsoft Office files (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), PDFs, web pages, images, and text files. Amazon limits the single file upload size to 5GB.

Using an overlay technology, Zocalo allows users to collaborate through feedback and comments on files. Unfortunately, the feedback and comments can only be viewed on the web and in the apps, but not on the files managed by the desktop sync application.

Important to highlight, Amazon is allowing Zocalo administrators to choose where the files are actually stored. During configuration, the administrator can choose between the US-East (Virginia), US-West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS Regions where Zocalo is currently being offered. Geographically, Zocalo is a square in downtown Mexican city, so it's interesting it's not available in South America.

Check it out here: Amazon Zocalo

Sign up for the Limited Preview here: http://aws.amazon.com/zocalo/limited-preview/