Here's a boast you don't hear everyday: Sharegate CEO and co-founder Simon De Baene claims he's created “the most insanely beautiful" Permissions Matrix Report (PMR) ever made.

The PMR is part of a wider version 5.5 release by the Montreal, Québec-based company. De Baene told CMSWire PMR is a response to the position many organizations find themselves in after they have moved to the cloud. “Once people get there they think ‘yeah that’s cool, we love it but now what do we do?’"

Sharegate is a migration and management tool for both Office 365 and SharePoint on-premises. And like many other companies operating in the Office 365 migration market, Sharegate is spreading its wings and moving into the post-migration management of Office 365.

Fear of the Cloud

Since its creation in 2011, Sharegate has built a reputation for easy-to-use tools for companies of all sizes. 

While "the fear [of the cloud] is still there," De Baene said more companies are responding to Microsoft's urging to move at least some data to the cloud and decommissioning all or part of their on-premises versions. "Microsoft is doing a hell of a marketing job," he said.

But because many companies have invested so much in their on-premises environments, they are reluctant to move everything and hand control of their complete infrastructure to a cloud vendor, even if the environment is as secure as Office 365 promises to be.

As a result, most companies are adopting hybrid environments that require careful management and the accurate migration of data from on-premises to the cloud for the data or applications that have been designated for storage or use in the cloud. 

Consequently, many businesses need effective management tools with strong security.

This is where the version 5.5 with PMR report comes in. The new matrix provides a way to view the permissions granted to users, both on-premises and in Office 365. It also provides users  the capability of drilling down through multiple environments from one place to understand security settings

"Sharegate adds an extra layer of security that's needed and welcome," said De Baene said.

Why Now?

De Baene called version 5.5 "the start of something different." The solution "makes life simple" by enabling both data migration and cloud management.

PMR fills a void Microsoft was too preoccupied to fill, he said.

“Microsoft is focused on user adoption. So the IT admin guy is probably not a priority for Microsoft. I get it. It’s difficult to manage so we decided to extend our product to support these IT people,” De Baene said.

"We wanted to build the most insanely beautiful Matrix Report ever made,” he added. 

"Our vision for this year is that we want to make people sleep at night. It’s simple and we like to keep things simple."