Mar 12, 2014

Across businesses, file sharing solutions have become a major asset, but they have far more capabilities than many adopters originally may think. With an appropriate enterprise-grade service, organizations can have a secure environment and realize numerous other substantial benefits. As the technology continues to evolve, decision makers will need to consider what the offering may bring to their operations and how to effectively leverage the system.

Processes hosted online or through the cloud have long been subject to concerns over how viable they are in business environments. However, as the solutions develop, the issues are quickly being mitigated with advanced features. ZDNet contributor James Kendrick noted that file services offer substantial storage capacity to preserve essential information in one location, supporting the need for constantly available mobile resources. With more users bringing their personal devices into the workplace, the online file sharing platform will provide employees with their documents on-hand at any time, which will boost productivity and ensure that all staff members have the most recent information when they need it.

“Just saving documents in the cloud is not good enough, they must be readily accessible in the future,” Kendrick wrote. “It doesn’t matter how many files you have stored in the cloud if you can’t easily get at them when needed.”

Using file sharing for recovery
Losing data in a breach or having information stolen can generate significant financial consequences, making it necessary to establish a recovery plan. Online file storage offers a solution to this dilemma as it provides access to documents as long as there is a stable Internet connection. In fact, 63 percent of surveyed executives placed disaster recovery as the top benefit for the cloud-based file storage system, Silicon ANGLE reported. With a considerable failure rate of 2 to 4 percent in hard drives, and a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee from many online platform providers, the transition to cloud file sharing programs is the next step in business innovation. This could reduce the 140,000 drive crashes that occur in the U.S. each week.

“If you haven’t taken that first step into the cloud, I think you [should] pick an application your environment – data protection is a good one, whether it be backup or replication from a disaster recovery standpoint – you pick one of those and start to give it a try,” Wikibon’s Stu Miniman told the source. “You not only try it from a technology aspect, but you also start looking at it from a financial aspect.”