ConnectWise Control
If you are like many of the organizations we work with, you might be struggling to make a decision on what parts of your business to move to the cloud. File storage is one piece of your cloud puzzle that has a large effect on your workforce. Adam and Jordan dig into the complexities of the cloud, explaining what you need to know and what factors should be considered when deciding to move all, some or none of your files in this webinar filmed on February 27th.
Topics of conversation include:
- What is Cloud Storage?
- One Drive & Office 365
- Dropbox
- On-Prem vs. Cloud
- Hybrid Solutions
- Security and backups
Adam Devereaux:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another NXT Webinar. My name is Adam Devereaux, and I’m the healthcare vertical leader, and I would say a bit of a Cloud Storage nerd
Jordan Briney:
I’m Jordan Briney, one of our Remote Support Team engineers here as well. I’m excited and just in the words of Adam just said, yeah, a Cloud Storage nerd.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about files, Cloud Storage, and if that’s right for your team and organization. We’re going to take a little bit of a step back and look at the bigger picture, a little bit of Cloud Storage or files 101, if you will. So hopefully you find this interesting. There may be some things you already know, but I think if you stick around to the end, it will be worthwhile.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, definitely. A little bit of housekeeping before we get into our actual webinar here. We do want to just send a quick promo here. We have an event coming up on March 5th that is, Beyond the Silver Bullet. March 5th at Terra Square here. If you want more information you can email Becca for more information. And aside from that at the end of our webinar, there will also be a Q&A available for you guys. If you have any questions, feel free to post them throughout the chat. Also, have that session ready for later on today. And in case that you do miss this, don’t worry. There is a recording that will be published later for you to view and enjoy.
Adam Devereaux:
Or if you want to share it with anyone else.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, all right. So, let’s get started here Adam.
Adam Devereaux:
All right, so I want to ask the question, what is a file? But from the perspective of what it means to you as an individual and as an organization, we’re not going to do a technical deep dive-
Jordan Briney:
We won’t go into the zeros and ones necessarily.
Adam Devereaux:
So more of really thinking about what are files that are important to our organization, how do we use them, what are they used for? That’s really going to be important as we continue to talk about this Cloud Storage journey for organizations, they really need to understand what those are. And so in my experience you can kind of general… There’s a few general categories that you can often put a lot of them into. They’re not universally applicable, but these may be helpful for thinking about what you have in your organization.
Adam Devereaux:
So first category is going to be business record files. So these would be things like orders, order records, invoices, licensing, things like that, that as you go through the course of business, files are generated and they have to be stored somewhere, structured so that can be found. In some cases these are stored inside of applications that you may have like finance software, ERP, EHR systems, and the like. So the second category I would call application specific files. So these are files that through the course of you generating content, let’s say CAD files are another example. They’re files that are specific to the application that you’re using to generate content or output later.
Adam Devereaux:
In some cases those files won’t be the final product. There may be other output, but you need to retain those files as well. And then the third, are really kind of the collaborative documents, the living documents. These are things like sales orders, production trackers, scheduling documents. So, in some cases these functions maybe should be in a program, but there isn’t a good program to put them in. They’re often Excel documents and these are almost like mini programs for the organization. It’s where a lot of work gets done through.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, and a big part about this to note is that a lot of these files that we’re discussing are quintessential toward the business operation. Whether it’s the craft that you have behind it or it’s the actual business management and details behind it. So keep in mind with that, we have those three categories here as… What we constitute today as are considered files in these matters here.
Adam Devereaux:
So I want to take actually kind of a, turn the clock back a little bit. Go back in time. Talk about what we did before networking, right? So if you have a file on your computer, let’s say, and I can date myself here going back to like a 386 or my Apple IIGS that I had way back when… It wasn’t a network. There was… The way that if I wanted to share a with you, I put it on a floppy disc generally, right? We didn’t even have USB keys.
Adam Devereaux:
So when companies or when networking came about, that really kind of revolutionized the ability to share files and information. That was really kind of the main purpose behind networking in the first place and that’s where you had a special computer that we call the file server that we would move those files to. So instead of it being sitting on my computer and then I have to get it to your computer, instead we take that file and we put it on a centralized computer, a file server, and that’s a physical thing inside of a physical building.
Jordan Briney:
Yep. And that’s important to note here that what we’re addressing right now is local storage to start with. And that before the dawn of plugging Ethernet cable and having access to a file server, you had to really make that transfer physically and locally here. And as a business environment, especially for you in a collaboration or anything, it’s not really practical if you’re more than one person working at this company, that’s for sure. So it’s important to note that now that we have the ability, this is where we’re kind of getting into on-prem storage and if you want to touch base a little more on how we get our file server up and going here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so I’ve a little bit of a diagram. I figure we can kind of move things around and hopefully this will help from a visual standpoint. So in this instance we have a central file server, these are physical networks or wired networks or wireless. But either way, I have to be connected, my computer has to be connected to the network inside of the building. And then typically this would show up as a network drive. And so in the Windows world, you would basically take that folder that’s on a server and then you map it onto a computer to a drive letter. So we’re all used to the C Drive. That’s the hard drive that’s in our computer. So different organizations would pick different letters. The M Drive, the T Drive, the S Drive, many of you are familiar or have one of those now.
Adam Devereaux:
So basically, it’s a pseudo drive. It looks to applications like it’s a hard drive on my computer, but instead it’s connected to a server. And when I go to that, let’s say M Drive and you go to that M Drive, we’re looking at the same files. Those files aren’t on our computer, they’re on the server. And so that leads to some challenges as we’ll get into. But this way it isn’t about me getting the file from my computer to your computer. It’s that we both have a common place that we can go to access those files. Now that also means we need to think about things like backing those up, making sure that they’re recoverable, making sure that we can survive disasters. It’s tied to a physical building, needs an Internet connection or multiple Internet connections, power outages, all those things can affect our access to them.
Adam Devereaux:
The biggest challenges that we see with this model, this paradigm, if you will, which is where a lot of organizations are now, is getting access to those files when you’re not in the building. That’s one of the biggest ones, and that also means sharing files both internally and externally, can be a challenge where people are emailing files around, right? And that’s not a situation that you typically want because when you’re emailing files, you’re really making lots of copies of that file. So every person that gets that email gets their own individual copy of that file. Now there’s various versions that are floating out there and you lose control over it, right? It’s gone now as far as you’re concerned from your control, it’s in their mailboxes. They can do whatever they want.
Jordan Briney:
And from a collaboration perspective, once you’re sending the email, let’s just use an example, let’s say that I had an invoice that I need you to take a look at and I just kept sending you a different copy and then we were constantly making these edits back and forth. There’s like 40 copies of this by this point. Well, if we host it onto a location and then we just pointed off to you and say, “Hey, it’s located here.” We could have at least one centralized copy and we’re not referencing old, outdated documentation or old invoice edits, notes, et cetera. We’re trying to centralize it so that we’re working on the same ideal and we’re not spreading around copies that no longer need to exist anymore, have an accident come up because of that.
Adam Devereaux:
Right. Yeah. And we can… I want to talk a little bit about what the experience is there. So this has been around as a technology for decades, right? When we’ve been setting up file servers since Windows NT, where there’s protocols that these computers are all used to speaking. It’s a very tried and trusted, tried and tested paradigm. So the challenges with specifically like Office documents for example, is you typically have one user editing, right? Multiple people are in the document, it actually causes issues. It’s not supposed to allow that. Word for example, will create a lock file. The rest of the Office programs do as well in that directory and that tells you when you’ve opened that file, “Oh, this file is in read only mode and so-and-so has access.”
Adam Devereaux:
And you can request it to be unlocked and sometimes that gets stuck and it’s not really there, causes issues. But this is really kind of a catch all way to store files. There’s a lot of bandwidth because it’s in the building. So my computer, especially if I’m wired in via Ethernet, typically has a lot of bandwidth to the server. So it’s pretty fast. And when I say catchall, it means that, in many cases, it’s the place where we put all of those different files. We also have to deal with permissions, right? Everybody has access to it, but we’re going to have different folders and restrict permissions and we’ve seen kind of time and time again, where those permissions get messed up and now people get access to things they shouldn’t.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, and as we’re touching on this, essentially what we’re going out is kind of the pros and cons beyond it. So and disagree with me if I’m wrong, but essentially when you’re on an on-premises environment, when you’re running a file server, some of the pros do go across is that you don’t necessarily need Internet access, but you need network access, internal to your building to be able to access it. You’re confined to the current hardware that you have, depending on how fast you can go to upload and download, whatever that you’re copying and editing at that time.
Jordan Briney:
But essentially for the most part, as long as you’re up to date on your equipment, you’re usually in a better position to be able to get that. In addition, you may have more of a centralized management and control within the Windows environment to be able to control who has access to what, who can see who, et cetera. So that’s kind of your pros beyond it. Cons, you kind of mentioned that already. Once we go outside of building function, it’s a little more difficult to really get what we want out of that. What you think?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah that’s where a lot of the limitations are starting to arise. And in addition, a lot of organizations are kind of on a Cloud journey, right? So we are starting, let’s say with line of business applications that are now SaaS based and you start to get to a point where you’re wondering what are we really using our servers for? And files are one of the last use cases that are kind of tying us to physical servers in our building. Print server and Windows Active Directory are kind of the two main other use cases that we see that are really leading those servers or keeping them in place. And so as organizations oftentimes need to be more collaborative with external participants, as they need to be able to have flexibility, have people be able to work from home, this can really be a limitation and an inferior experience.
Adam Devereaux:
It also, we really start to get to some security concerns because of that loss of control to where once you’re inside the network, there can be attacks like ransomware that would affect all of those files. And so you need to have the ability to recover. You can have an issue where the people are saving files on their local computer to get around that difficulty of working externally. So now you have files that are kind of outside of the system. Somebody’s hard drive crashes, they lose it. So we have to start looking at how we backup computers and it just creates an environment where users have to work around the systems we’ve created. And a lot of organizations are feeling that constraint-
Jordan Briney:
And to add on one more part of that too. An example that I have seen, history from years back was, if a disgruntled employee, if you don’t establish your permissions correctly, might be able to access sensitive information and then most leak that out to sources that should not have access to this information, whether it be payroll or even personal information if it really got to it.
Adam Devereaux:
Well in some cases they don’t become disgruntled until they see files that they shouldn’t have.
Jordan Briney:
Yep, that also. The reason to become disgruntled in that case. For sure.
Adam Devereaux:
So, scaling can be an issue sometimes and when we talk about being tied to the servers on-prem, the downside means that you really have a life cycle around those, that piece of equipment, right? We need to think about data growth. We need to think about when do we need to upgrade our version. So when we start looking at the server 2008, R2 End of Life, that’s big issue right now. A lot of people’s file servers, well now we need a new server, now we need new licensing and there can be a lot of costs that are associated with that we don’t really think about when we start looking at a five year life cycle timescale.
Jordan Briney:
And as your business continues to grow, there’s only so much finite storage that you can deal with too. I mean, over time you probably can upgrade that. That’s going to require maintenance Windows. It’s going to require additional hardware. It’s going to require you to think about more of this stuff in the future.
Adam Devereaux:
You’re buying it in buckets, right? You’re saying is my box big enough? Now I’m going to add more, a Whole another one on top and then we’ll start to fill that up.
Jordan Briney:
Yep.
Cloud Storage
Adam Devereaux:
Okay. So Cloud file storage. There’s a lot of different types of Cloud file storage, so we want to get into some of those specifics as well. There’s a lot of different providers of Cloud file storage and a lot of them have maybe different pros and cons or a lot of common features. And so we’re going to try to focus on that part and maybe some things that you have available to you now that you’re not necessarily using. So when we look at, say some of the big names, Dropbox or file storage and Office 365, Box, we’re going to focus a little bit more on Office 365 because it’s kind of a common denominator here, but a lot of these capabilities are shared in other platforms as well.
Adam Devereaux:
So when we look at Cloud file storage, going back to that life cycle of a story of the file, we’ve got the file on the server right now, and we’re talking about migrating our files away from the building and into a Cloud service provider. So that means it’s really still on servers somewhere, but it’s on a platform that’s kind of a webscale platform. It may be on multiple servers all over the country. For example, we have geographic diversity and it’s no longer tied to the bandwidth in my building. So rather than having to VPN in and connect into the building and get to the file, I have access to it largely wherever I’m at because all I really need is an Internet connection.
Adam Devereaux:
Now we’ll talk about the security aspects of that as well, but for now that immediately starts solving some problems and when we talk about let’s say Office 365, in that environment, now you get access to some capabilities that you didn’t otherwise have. So that might be collaborative file editing. So that’s a big one, right? As soon as we put the, let’s say an Excel document in a SharePoint, a team’s file storage or OneDrive, now I can share it with you, but I’m sharing a link to that file. You can access that file or go through common destination in SharePoint.
Jordan Briney:
And it’s proof of concept. When we normally prepare these, we get together and we start editing the same, excuse me, the same PowerPoint documents. We start editing the same Excel sheet. We start editing the same Word doc or in some cases we’ve used things like Dropbox paper as an example, and so it’s a multi collaborative environment that we can all see the same thing and see real time edits when something’s going on in that avenue there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so you really have a versioning history, but it allows you to not overwrite somebody else’s work because you’re working on it at the same time. So that’s an immediate benefit that we often see. The versioning history is another one that can be a positive, but the fact that now it’s stored in a common location, we still have safety security around it or restrictions around it and, but you can enable specific external sharing capabilities so that I can share it to somebody outside of my organization, but oftentimes I’m sharing a link. I’m not actually sending them that file. Right? That’s the right way to share files using Cloud Storage. I send that link out, somebody can access it. That allows me to control it in the future, like I want to restrict that file access, I’m going to turn off that sharing so that it’s no longer being shared and at that point, I’ve regained control of it again.
Adam Devereaux:
Now, I mean, somebody could download it onto their computer, there’s still, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s not perfect security, but it’s oftentimes a much more secure process than using email. Especially when you start looking at any sort of compliance requirements. You can use Cloud file storage that is a HIPAA secure and share with the external participants by using the right processes. If I’m sending a file via email, it’s never really HIPAA secure. I mean you can use these encryption systems, encrypted email systems, but those oftentimes provide a very clumsy user experience as well.
Jordan Briney:
And that’s important to note that what we’re discussing, it’s worth reiterating that a lot of these can happen in avenues such as teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox, even as your file storage can even fall on the same line that we see here. And that’s nice that we kind of have what we’re discussing and all of those platforms here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes, so specifically kind of deep diving into let’s say files and teams. That’s where we start to see another trend with Cloud file storage where we’re embedding file storage inside of other systems that we may use. And another example, again for preparing for these webinars is that we use a group teams chat. Inside of that teams chat, we can store files. So that’s a location where we can quickly access say a PowerPoint file that we’re working on, we can jump into that and edit that collaboratively, but it’s in a commonplace that I’m already going to get work done and collaborate with people and chat with people.
Adam Devereaux:
I don’t have to go into somewhere else. It’s very easy to obtain and you start to look at a different way to store data and that kind of gets back to what we said in regards to files that are business collaborative documents. Not necessarily the records or the application specific, but the Cloud file storage scenario of using something like Office 365 storage or files inside of teams, is ideal for those collaborative documents.
Jordan Briney:
So we’ve been going on the hype train about Cloud Storage, but it isn’t necessarily the perfect model here. Adam, I think it’d be important for us to discuss what necessarily can constitute as a con when we get into Cloud Storage here. Do you want to kind of start us off with what you think could be a con to this?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so I think those other categories are where we start to run into specifically application specific files. So you may need to have a multi Cloud strategy or multi file storage strategy to be able to tackle things like video files that you’re editing. We’ve set up high speed, what we’d call micro file sharing networks inside of some environments where users that are collaborating on large video files are able to access those at really high speed and they’re accessing them locally.
Adam Devereaux:
Now we’re using Cloud file storage backup, but that’s not being accessed by users. And the limitation there is, if I, let’s say want to access that file that’s in Cloud Storage and I don’t already have it synced down to my computer, that means I have to wait for it to download. So the Internet connection speed is the first time con, right? We’re dependent on that Internet connection typically, to get that file or you’re synchronizing it bound or your computer.
Jordan Briney:
Or without Internet connection, you’re really kind of at a loss of business there at that point because it’s tough for you to, with the exception of course that it does keep an offline cached version.
Adam Devereaux:
if you have it synchronized.
Jordan Briney:
Exactly, but if you don’t then you run into some complications because then you can’t necessarily get to what you’re looking for here. So and Internet access is essential but the nice part is about in today’s day and age that’s not uncommon for you to really experience a situation you’re not on the Internet at this point-
Adam Devereaux:
I would argue the Internet’s pretty important for lots of business operations, especially when those SaaS operations or those SaaS software, Cloud based software packages are in place. Although, the flip side to that is, if I have my files in the Cloud and my Internet connection where I am goes down, I can always go someplace else, right? I can leave and go home and use my Internet connection at home. I could go to McDonald’s and use the Internet connection there. And because your connection to those files is encrypted, even when you’re using other networks, that’s secure as well.
Jordan Briney:
Yep, exactly. So I think it’s safe to say you’ve covered a pretty good base here between on-prem versus Cloud at this point. Let’s kind of go through some cases where it might be the best opportunity to create the best of both worlds, in a situation here. You want to start us off with an example that you’ve got for a hybrid environment that we could work with?
Adam Devereaux:
Well, another example that ties us down to the file server on-prem and then where you start to look at alternative ways. So you’d brought up Azure files, right? So let’s say that I have a W Drive right now and I’ve got those documents that we’re working on constantly. Let’s say that there’s templates that I want people to be able to use. There may be Excel documents that we’re creating, that are multiple people editing and working on simultaneously. Putting those files, let’s say in a team’s file storage or inside of a SharePoint that’s dedicated for that purpose or different purposes, that’s ideal. Now I may have an application that depends on that mapped drive, right?
Adam Devereaux:
I have a legacy application and it still depends on me having a mapped drive, so I really have to think about do I want to get rid of that application? What’s our timeframe and our process for moving to a different service or application and do I want to just leave the servers in place? Can I do that based on the support life cycle of the operating systems or do I need to move something like Azure files, which is kind of an in between, right? So in that case I have a file server in the Cloud. I’m still accessing it via SMB in this case, but I can map that down to a map drive. Now I’m accessing it directly through my Internet connection. So the Internet speed is really important, but it’s a way that you can have an app that still requires a mapped network drive put to be using Cloud Storage.
Jordan Briney:
Yes. And another example we could use is a situation where you as a company have different departments that you work in. What maybe somebody as a design engineer might be utilizing something completely different from marketing, from financing. And so, maybe that’s where a situation comes up where, well let’s use this example. Let’s say we are a manufacturing company and we have users that are designing CAD drawing, solid works and the whole nine.
Jordan Briney:
Those would be best to probably run on a local file server in order to potentially keep their best possible bandwidth and collaboration down to a minimum on those. And then your finance department, your marketing department, we could probably move that stuff over to Cloud, since we would run into a case where we could still manage permissions and still be able to have what we would like from their situation there. So we can have that or we would like it to be in that case here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jordan Briney:
So I think it’s safe to say at this point here, we’ve definitely-
Adam Devereaux:
What’s your time? How are we doing on time?
Jordan Briney:
Oh, we’ve got a couple of minutes here. We’re running a little bit early. We were so excited about Cloud Storage today.
Adam Devereaux:
So, one thing I want to talk about then is Cloud security. And this is where ultimately it can be kind of an advantage and allow us to improve our security, but we need to take this into consideration. So business identity or user identity management is really kind of what we need to focus on for the future because in that on-prem environment, where we have an active directory server, my computer’s joined to that domain and I’m logged in, I have business identity management going on there. I’m logging into the computer via the user account that is in the server. And that’s what’s also given me permission to access the resources that are on that server.
Adam Devereaux:
And there’s really a whole thing going on there that we kind of take for granted. So when we start to move to Cloud, we have another identity in some cases. So if you have Office 365 and it’s set up, I would say correctly, it’s going to be synchronized down to that server identity. Or in some cases, an organization may not have an on-prem server anymore at all. So maybe it’s only a Cloud identity. A G Suite account would be a similar Cloud identity, a business identity. We need to protect that because the number one source of breaches that’s happening out there now, various attacks on patients is from users’ identities getting compromised and if we’re moving more information to the Cloud, all the more reason we need to make sure those are protected.
Adam Devereaux:
And so we start looking at things like multifactor authentication, least access rules. So just making sure that people only have access to the things that they need and that can help prevent this, the impact if somebody’s identity does get compromised. But it also, as we start looking forward, you start to look at more what some models in the security industry, we call it Zero Trust, which is where the network that we care about, the old trusted walled garden[, network goes away-
Jordan Briney:
Call back up to our previous webinar.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. Then we’re looking at things like what device are users accessing from? We’re looking at intelligence every single time the user’s accessing business documents. And into things like passwordless where instead of even having a password that I can use to log in as a user, my ability to access work resources is through validation, through a combination of things like my smartphone and an authenticator app that I have on that. If I do two keys or physical keys, which is really kind of cool way that we can improve security. But because we’re moving our Cloud resources or files up to that Cloud environment I harp on, we want to make sure that we’re taking steps to make sure that that’s protected and that ability for users’ accounts to get compromised, causing breaches is minimized as much as possible.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, and it’s a well known state of fact that most people have said, “Well, the Cloud is the future.” And there’s so many things to look forward. Honestly, there is. Every year it feels like we continue to see better features, better collaboration tools and better opportunities for us to be able to use the Cloud and. Even myself, I run into a couple of situation. Okay, fine. Using the Cloud versus local storage has been such a great advantage from. Some things I like to be able to have between the couple of different devices I have in my
Jordan Briney:
And it’s nice that I’m able to be able to collaborate and still work on stuff even personally for myself or share it off to colleagues as it presents here as well. But to your point about security, I do have to agree with that immensely. That it’s nice that we can put a better user identity behind it because from a management perspective, it’s sometimes can be difficult to locate where a compromise situation occurs.
Jordan Briney:
And so in these matters, and instances where we are able to actually centralize, “Oh, this is where this problem originally began.” Helps us as a management team be able to put this together and say, “Here’s the situations that we’ve got. Okay, we need a lock down this person for the time being. Now we can investigate, find more information, what happened, some sources.” And we’ll be able to actually manage this a lot easier from our perspective.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and I think you brought up a really good point too, which is that we’re talking about multi-device access. So when you start to really live in a pure Cloud Storage, it really kind of becomes game changing where I’m not tied to a specific device, in a specific way to get to that, and this is kind of a bit of news. Microsoft released the new office app for mobile, for Android and iOS. So it’s kind of a combined experience where you have Word, Excel, PowerPoint in one application. It’s pretty slick. It has really cool features like, if you have a table on a piece of paper, you can scan it, it’ll convert it into an Excel table, things like that.
Adam Devereaux:
But that’s an example of when I have my files that I’m working on, let’s say in SharePoint, in OneDrive, I have pretty immediate access to that and the system starts to use intelligence around presenting like, here’s the files you may want to use. I can search on multiple devices, even inside of teams I can search and it’ll pop up files that seem to correspond to what I’m searching for and it really, it makes the information much more readily available at your fingertips and I’ve found that really useful, where I’m less required to get my laptop out and do specific things, but if I want to make a quick change or pull something up, I can quickly access that on my phone or tablet or home computer for example.
Jordan Briney:
Exactly. Well, I think that kind of covers what we wanted to touch base on this webinar here. We did get from the voice in our ear that it looks like the video quality was a little bit different this time around. We’ll go ahead and get that addressed here for the next one. We appreciate you guys, this patience and hopefully you enjoyed Adam and I’s wonderful conversation rather than our video more so.
Adam Devereaux:
So voice in the ear, do we have any questions that came up we want to cover?
Jordan Briney:
While they’re looking at that, we can also throw on a promo that a, we’ll of course have our next webinar coming up here in March 19th, mark that on your calendars because that’ll be a really exciting session where we get to talk more about Microsoft teams. I know we’ve had a previous webinar on it, but as more features have unraveled and as more opportunities and more businesses have become interested in this op, it’s definitely great for us to be able to put that together and provide some use case examples on how to use that in your business thing.
Rebecca Zaagman (off-screen):
We’ve got a question from Mark. Any service providers you recommend for Cloud based server backup?
Adam Devereaux:
Well, that’s a complicated question. I think I’d defer to, we would love to have a conversation about that. It really depends on your specifics. Are we talking about… If you’re talking about backing up your Cloud resources such as backing up SharePoint sites, one of our partners is Ditto SaaS Backup. We found to be really effective and important to be able to cover some of the scenarios that, let’s say the built in recovery options don’t. So that would be one that I’d recommend. If we’re talking about backing up on-prem resources to the Cloud, then there’s a whole, that’s a huge area to cover.
Rebecca Zaagman (off-screen):
He did say for example Backblaze. I don’t know if that changes the answer to your question at all.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes, so to me that means more of like backing up my computer to the Cloud or my service to the Cloud. Backblaze is a good example. You’ve got your B2, there’s a lot of other providers of just raw Cloud file storage, so that’s kind of what I put Backblaze into, in the B2 side. If I use it at home for my personal computer, but if you’re backing up servers, then I really want to look at things like how do I recover? I want a larger disaster recovery scenario or a strategy in place. So looking at backup, looking at recovery options, looking at retention capabilities.
Adam Devereaux:
So that’s really a whole different ballgame and really, just to wrap up that area too, is that we realize that Cloud file storage can be a complicated topic and oftentimes for any organization you have to take a different strategy, you have to kind of really evaluate all the different files in the way that your users are using those. So that’s something that we’d love to help you with as well. And taking a look at why you may want to use one service provider or another for the different type types of files that you may have.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, it’s definitely worth the conversation with your reps because every business operates in its own fashion. So there’s some granularity and some uniformity behind it, but having that conversation and understanding what you stand as, are you better as hybrid? Are you better as Cloud? Are you better as on-prem? There’s advantages to each and definitely worth the conversation with that, your salespeople.
Adam Devereaux:
Great. All right-
Jordan Briney:
Okay.
Adam Devereaux:
Well thanks again. We’ll see you next time. Appreciate you joining us.
