One of the drawbacks of cloud storage, at least when it comes to business or enterprise implementations, is that it comes with a hefty price tag. According to Cloud Engine’s Pogoplug, it will be more cost effective for small and medium sized companies to use existing hardware and use for the same type of shared file storage that has made Dropbox successful in the industry.

The new Pogoplug Team software from Cloud Engines can be installed on a preexisting workstation or file servers running Windows, Mac or Linus, which allows said system to act as a secure storage repository for users who are given access privilege.

The good thing about the Pogoplug Team software is that is very cost-effective. instead of spending $600 per year for five people sharing Google Drive, or $900 per year for Box, you only need to use existing hardware that you have, lying round, and spend $15 per user for Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug Team, the yearly total amounting to only $75. For truly secure offsite backups, you can still use other paid cloud service, but since your storage is centralized to one server, you only need to get one account, effectively reducing the total cost of a secure cloud storage network.

Another major advantage of Pogoplug is speed. Since all internal file access is running through LAN, it will be extremely fast compared to cloud storage options that have to go through the net. There’s also the fact that bandwidth costs money, so if your cloud service is constantly hogging up all the bandwidth, it can add up to the total cost of running a cloud storage.

If the company ever runs out of storage, it is very easy to add a new drive onsite, which can be inexpensive, but Pogopogo also provides real cloud storage service for a little extra cost, if the company chooses to go that route, which means there is no need to look at other cloud storage services.