· Access files from anywhere.
· Share files safely with colleagues, collaborators and customers.
· Backup with ease.
Nowadays, people need to work from anywhere. Once upon a time, that would mean setting up access to the office server with VPNs and pulling files over painfully slow internet connections.
Gone are those days!
What is Cloud Storage?
Cloud Storage means having your files saved in ‘The Cloud’; that’s another computer (or number of them) somewhere else on the internet. It means those files can be accessed in the same way from anywhere you have an internet connection.
The advent of Cloud Storage meant that you could do-away with a file server in your office and, when you needed to access them remotely or share them with a collaborator, there would be no more need for someone to set up VPN access. Services like DropBox lead the way but since there are other great options.
What to look for in Cloud Storage?
Now there are many systems to choose from. What are the key things to look for? I’d say the list is short:
· Is it secure?
· Does it do what you need?
· Ease of set-up.
· Can it grow with the business?
Is it Secure?
Security for your business information should be top priority. With thousands of hackers spending their whole time trying to access company’s files, it is essential that the system you chose can stand up to those attacks.
Multi-factor Authentication is a key component for securing your web-based accounts. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) means using another way to confirm who you are before you are allowed access to something. Most of us will recognise this from online banking, where you need a code to get in, not just a password. In fact, any site or account online which is important to you should have Multi-Factor Authentication switched on. That includes your emails and certainly any file storage.
Some Cloud Storage systems get top rating from comparison sites. For example, zdnet said that iDrive was its recommendation for “best cloud storage service overall” but listed a problem with the service as “no two-factor authentication”. Two (or Multi) Factor Authentication should be a ‘must have’ on your list.
Being secure also includes having the ability to control who sees certain files on your system, such as limiting management files to managers or owners. It is the ability to remove users when they no longer are with the company or just when they no longer need to see a particular file.
Security is also making sure that you can stop people, even employees, accessing files from insecure locations (like home PCs, if they shouldn’t be using them). Or enabling you to prohibit access from abroad, or certain countries which might be an issue, as a hacker is going to be making those connections, not a legitimate employee.
Does it do what you need?
You can be quite flexible with how you set up cloud storage. It can look like normal desktop storage or it can be cloud-only storage which you use from a browser.
The key is to know how you want the people in your business to work. After that, find the solution which helps them to do it. Sometimes people find a technology and then work around what it can do. That is the tail wagging the dog and, though everything is a bit of a compromise in the end, that approach should be avoided.
Ease of set-up.
If you are looking to manage a system yourself, it is key to find one which is easy to set up and to make future changes to.
If something is overly complicated or doesn’t fit with the way you work, it will get in your way and it won’t provide the solution you need to work efficiently.
Growing with the business.
As your business grows and more team members come on board, or you collaborate with more people, you need your system to be flexible and accommodate the new ways you are looking to work. It should be able to give you easy ways to add new team members. It should be expandable. It should allow collaboration with people outside the business, be that your accountants, your sub-contractors or your customers.
Help me!
If you are unsure about it all and would like to speak to someone, we’d love to help. Either send an enquiry to enquiries@riverfordconsultants.co.uk or call us on 01892 886 995 and we’ll see what we can do to answer your questions.
Microsoft 365 - it does everything.
At Riverford Consultants, we are great fans of Microsoft 365. We think it is the best cloud storage solution for most of the businesses we support. It has something for everyone and accommodates micro businesses up to larger enterprises. The advantage of using the 365 system is that it will do what your company needs now, and it will also be able to scale as you grow. It has all the security and management systems you will need built in and a world of third-party systems to add on, as required.
Microsoft 365 isn’t just a file system either, it has the email system, it has the communications systems, it has the Teams working environment, tools like Planner and Whiteboard, it has the Bookings system and also all the Microsoft Office suite that everyone knows, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and so on.
It makes sense, as all these parts integrate with each other, to use the system for your files and email at the same time.
The OneDrive system comes with any 365 Business account (Basic, Standard or Premium, E3, E5, etc.) and so does the same sort of storage in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. They all give users the ability to access information from wherever you need them to. It gives the business the ability to secure the information too.
Share a link to your files.
Back in the day, we shared files by attaching them to an email, or sending a disk with them on. Once you pressed the ‘send’ button, it was gone and there was not much we could do about keeping it safe after that. Perhaps we put a password on the document but how did we send that? By email? Remember, standard email is a bit like a post card on the internet. If you own one of the machines which is passing the email along the chain to its destination, you can read it. That’s not great for sensitive information.
Also, if we hoped that when we sent someone a document they would keep it private, we had to rely on that person not to forward the email on.
From the security point of view, it was all quite hit-and-miss. Today, however, things can be much better. We can send a link that gives people access to the document on our system. That sounds even worse but actually it is far more secure.
Why is Sharing a Link More Secure?
With cloud storage in Microsoft 365 we can share a link to the original document.
We can make sure people can’t download the files or edit them. That means we can let someone read a file without having to give them a copy to keep.
We can take away access whenever we want. Unlike sending someone a document – where they have a copy to keep - with a link we can stop people using it whenever we want.
We can make sure that it is harder for them to forward on; in order to read the document, they need a code sent to their email address which we shared it with. This means forwarding it on becomes much harder. Even if you forward on the link, the next person won’t get the code when they try to read it – only the right person does, so the code would need forwarding on too. Not impossible, but certainly much more secure.
Directly sharing access to a document (via a link) is so much easier and so much more secure than sending versions of the document ever was.
Why is Link Sharing Brilliant for Collaboration?
The other great advantage of cloud storage is the ease of collaborating on documents. Imagine a presentation being put together by a few people. Before cloud storage there were parts of the presentation being sent back and forth by email. There were many different versions of the file with many different names. After a short time, no one knew which version really was the last one or where to find it. The file system was often just controlled chaos with at least five versions of “Final”.
By working on the same file, none of this needs to be a problem again. There is just one file, in one place, with one name. Brilliant! It is easy to back it up. It is easy to roll back to a previous version if someone makes a big mistake.
File size is no longer an issue, either. Previously, with email messages limited to perhaps 10mb for attachments, it didn’t take long before you couldn’t send that PowerPoint presentation or photo. Now, we don’t need to. We just share the link.
Cloud storage makes collaboration easy inside a business but, add the ability to share with people outside the business too, and it becomes the most convenient way to work with anyone.
Backing up cloud storage
Backup for your files is a vital part of keeping a business safe from failure. Backing up cloud storage is easy. If you have chosen the Microsoft 365 system, there are a number of excellent solutions which will automatically keep the whole system safe. At Riverford Consultants, we like Acronis. There are other good ones too, like Arcserve. The key is that you can set it up so that: you are alerted if it goes wrong, that the information is kept for as long as you need, and that it is encrypted and safe. It should obviously be easy to restore too, either a small part of that information (like a lost file) or all of it (like a deleted account), as required. We chose to partner with Acronis as it provided all of those things.
Why back up something already in the cloud?
We often get asked, why would you back up something already saved in the cloud? Surely that means if we lose our computers or one breaks, we can still access the files online. Yes, that is true, but there are a lot of reasons which mean file storage still needs backup. Often it is a combination of factors which results in a problem. Here are some of them:
· A malicious employee who wants to delete files
· An accidental deletion of files
· Malware (viruses and the like) which encrypt your files
· Account issue (accidental deletion, for example)
Cloud storage can’t help if you lose a file and don’t notice in time to recover it. It can’t necessarily help if your files get encrypted and those changes are copied to the cloud. It can’t help with lost email accounts. So, a backup allows you to keep data longer and recover it whatever goes wrong.
Help me!
If you are still unsure how to do this and would like to speak to someone, we’d love to help. Either send an enquiry to enquiries@riverfordconsultants.co.uk or call us on 01892 886 995 and we’ll see what we can do to answer your questions.
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