There’s a violent struggle going on right now in the business sync ‘n’ share market of late, with the likes of Microsoft and Dropbox using sheer muscle power – a whopping 1TB and unlimited storage respectively – to grab a bigger market share. Microsoft has also been stressing the importance of Office integration with its OneDrive offering, what with collaboration such an in-demand feature these days.

Now though, EMC’s own sync ‘n’ share offering, Syncplicity, is also trying to differentiate itself by pointing out how much smarter it is. One great reason to use it, which Syncplicity doesn’t like to point out, is the very fine audit trails its service creates. Case in point – EMC is in the process of suing some of its ex-employees after they stored confidential company data in Syncplicity before jumping ship to rival firm PureStorage and passing on that data to their new bosses.

This feature has now been enhanced somewhat with new ‘Storage Vaults’, which allows users to create policies that determine where documents can reside. The “where” could be anything from a cloud storage provider to a private server residing within your networks firewall. In any case, Syncplicity seems to think customers will appreciate knowing exactly where their data is at all times, allowing them to adhere to strict governance rules and take into account data sovereignty laws. In other words, it’s far more versatile than what Dropbox can offer – all of its files are stored in servers on US soil.

Syncplicity has also made its data security virtually watertight too. It’s added a new ‘two-man’ authentication method for adding new storage resources that it says is based on US military missile launch systems. Essentially, it requires two operators to use the same authentication key, which must be verified against another key that’s kept sealed in an envelope. According to Syncplicity, this level of authentication means it’s impossible for third-party cloud providers to access data held within a Syncplicity data store, even if someone from a pesky law enforcement agency asks them to do so.

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