CTERA has placed its emphasis on the need to share documents internationally. Its offering puts cloud gateways at each enterprise site and presents them like a NAS with its contents in a single online storage pool. CTERA’s gateway caches hot data on-premise for fast access, and tiers colder data to cheaper object storage in the cloud, all managed through a global file system.
There are two benefits to this. The key one is that any branch location can access latest versions of documents modified anywhere else, and collaborators and applications can access these documents via SMB, which is well-known, whereas in “traditional” cloud storage object access is usually obligatory.