Egnyte, which blends local and online storage for SMBs, pulled in millions in VC investment today.Egnyte announced Series A funding of $6 million from Polaris Venture Partners today. Egnyte blends premises and online storage services. Customers can choose to deploy their own premises storage devices. They load Egnyte's Local Cloud software onto the device, and the service copies files from the local storage up to the cloud.

Users can access files either locally or via a Web browser from the cloud. The storage service also doubles as a simple collaboration and file-sharing product.

I expect we'll see continued investment in the hybrid storage market, particularly for services aimed at small and medium-size businesses. The hybrid approach alleviates customer concerns that data and files won't be available during outages, or if the provider goes out of business.

Meanwhile, cloud-based storage makes great sense as a low-cost, low-maintenance backup solution for SMBs, and there's a huge market of small and mid-size companies in need of data storage options. In addition, while overall VC investment is down compared with previous years, IT-oriented startups are still attractive to investors.

Egnyte is an InformationWeek Startup 50 company.