Amazon.com Inc. officially entered the enterprise file syncronization race on Wednesday with the launch of Zocalo, the homegrown cloud locker it unveiled in July as a response to fast-growing corporate adoption of existing solutions such rival Microsoft Corp.’s OneDrive.

Named after the Spanish word for town square, the platform is exiting its nearly two-month private beta period with a bang, bringing a host of management features and a characteristically scalable pricing model into the ring. The offering has been built from the ground up to the cater to the needs of the largely risk-averse organizations Amazon is targeting with its public cloud strategy.

Zocalo swaps out the self-service management of consumer-oriented file sharing services for a centralized dashboard that allows admins to create accounts, allocate storage space and enforce governance policies from the same place. A user can be assigned privileges based on the requirements determined by an administrator, whether it be the ability to share specific folders with peers or the freedom to send links to outsiders.

The service plugs into popular on-premise user directories to save admins the hassle of individually registering workers into their companies’ Zocalo deployments and also comes integrated with CloudTrail, a logging tool Amazon introduced last November with the goal of making its cloud more transparent. The free utility records every request sent to a customer’s environment and periodically delivers the records in the form of easily readable JSON documents. It’s useful both for monitoring resource usage, and more importantly, monitoring security events such as configuration changes, which can be crucial in an environment hosting sensitive corporate documents.

For end-users, Zocalo makes it possible to share files up to five gigabytes in size, sync data across their different devices and collaborate with colleagues in real-time. The platform also includes a feature similar to the experimental Project Harmony feature from Dropbox Inc. that extends the core sharing capabilities into Office so as to display external edits in local versions of a document without necessitating a refresh.

Amazon is offering a 30-day trial of Zocalo with fifty 200-gigabyte seats to get organizations started with the service and is providing 50 gigabytes at no charge for users of its WorkSpaces desktop virtualization service.  Normal subscriptions start at five dollars a month after the free period is over, with the option to buy more storage on an incremental basis wherein  the price per terabyte goes down as the total amount purchased increases.

At the current rates,  a terabyte on Zocalo will set customers back $29 a month, which is almost three times  than what Google Inc., Microsoft and, as of this week, Dropbox are charging for the same capacity. But considering Amazon’s long history of undercutting the competition in the public cloud, it’s safe to assume that the ratio will even out over time – and sooner rather than later – once the retail giant settles into the market.

photo credit: billfrog2 via photopin cc