With the worldwide pandemic, we have seen many companies have to change their business model in order to survive.
Where companies in the past were traditionally investing in making their office spaces comfortable, efficient, social spaces, now, most of us are working from our home ‘office’ (Yes, the might be the dining room table, or the kitchen bar, or the kids playroom.. but we’ll call it an office for now !)
Many people have realized that they can do it. Some can ‘get through it’. Others can’t imagine ever going back to the office…
This is the big challenge fore all involved – it just isn’t the same for anyone, and depends on the person, the company, the locations, etc.
So, for small business, the ‘work from home’ revolution has shown how some of us, even though we thought we were ‘mobile workers’, were not prepared and are not properly setup for remote working. Small companies with 2-15 employees are probably the hardest hit, as we have been working on our traditional networks, with or without file servers, probably with very little use of the ‘cloud’ for storage… we thought we were doing well, but now we know.. we weren’t.
So what to do ??
The first thing every company should do , pandemic or not, to make it possible for people to work remotely and to be ‘mobile’ , is CLOUD STORAGE. Get those files off your desktop and into the cloud.
WHY ? Because then you can always get them, never lose them and they go with you everywhere !
Many ‘individual’ cloud solutions work (like one drive, dropbox, etc) as a ‘replica’ or sync of your data. You save your files into your ‘my documents’ folder and sometime, when the time is right, your computer makes a copy of that into your cloud storage. And if you have other computers attached to the same cloud drive, they will often then sync/copy back out to those computers, and in short order, that file is now available everywhere you work. And , even without ANY of those computers, you can login via a web browser to your cloud provider and , voila, there’s your file !!
There are many options out there, and for the most part, most of them are solid, reputable, reliable services. Microsoft (onedrive) , Google (gdrive) , Apple (iCloud), Amazon (AWS/S3) etc. all have excellent options and you likely have a plan of some kind with one of them already so you needn’t start a new service !
You will want to evaluate what best suits your needs.. if you are a one or two person show, then it may be right for you to setup these ‘synch’ type drives and have the folders sync up to each other. This is fine for a relatively small number of files with a relatively small number of changes.
If you have a larger organization you will want to look for services that have file and folder permissions and where the files are stored and accessed from the cloud, not from a local synch’d copy. Some of the services like pCloud and Centrestack have great features and are very affordable and deserve your consideration even if you think you don’t need a lot of the features. Remember that if you just ‘share’ a One drive, you are potentially opening that up for the person you have shared it with to alter or delete your files and you might never see them again ..
Remember – even with the files in the cloud, you will still want to make sure you have file backups and that they are secured.. ‘accidental’ access to files in the cloud isn’t like leaving a computer logged in at the office. You are potentially opening your file access up to the world !! BE CAREFUL
We can evaluate your needs and help you design the right solution FOR YOU !
