A long time friend contacted me this evening as he was concerned that his 6 year old portable hard drive was starting to fail and wanted my opinion on what he should replace it with. My initial thought was that no one is still using portable hard drives in today’s age of cheap cloud based storage solutions so I began to ask questions about what he was trying to accomplish.
I quickly discovered, as I have with so many others, that my friend was working around the pain points he deals with on a daily basis due to outdated technology solutions at work. Specifically, his job requires that he connect to a server hosted at the office via a VPN connection to access files he needs to perform daily job duties. He described the VPN connection as incredibly slow so he decided to put all the necessary files on a Portable hard drive to take with him while he works in the field.
Just another end user finding ways to “Help” the business be more productive and save time right? My heart sank as this scenario is one that I see all too often while working with small business across the country. I quickly described my major concerns with what he was doing:
Data Exposure - Could be a big liability for the business
Data Loss - If the portable is lost or stolen all the time, effort and data will be lost
Are others doing the same thing - poorly implemented or designed systems quickly lead to “Shadow IT”
Most current version of document is not available to anyone else while stored on the portable HDD
This scenario is ideal for a Cloud solution. I advised my friend that a portable HDD was not the right solution in this scenario and discussed the ways a Cloud Solution would be ideal, specifically Microsoft Office 365. My friend also advised that they didn’t have much of an “IT Support” budget and that was part of the reason they were still in the IT “Stone Age”.
So how does a Microsoft O365 solution fit the bill in this scenario?
Eliminates the need for VPN - Remote workers as well as on site workers will securely access services and data via TLS internet connections.
Safe and Secure data storage - Since all data can be stored in OneDrive or OneDrive for Business it is secured and “Backed Up” by Microsoft. If business policy allows for data synchronization to local devices we have the ability to use MDM policy to ensure that data is encrypted on local disk and the ability to remotely wipe device if lost or stolen
Co-Authoring and Collaboration capabilities thru Microsoft Teams allow users to work on documents together in real time from any where in the world.
Since all of these services are hosted in Microsoft’s cloud almost all of the support is delivered by Microsoft and is included with the cost of license. Most of the business expense comes from the initial cost of migrating to the cloud solution and initial training of Admin and Staff. This solution also allows your support team or third party IT staff to easily service help desk request from anywhere and this drives down the cost.
Small business across America is operating on tight budgets and historically they skimp on IT support and systems. It pains me to be called in once disaster strikes as the cost and liability of the Data loss/exposure often bankrupt the business. If this sounds familiar to you take a moment to contact us so we can discuss your situation.
Robert “Ben” Stewart | Principal Consultant