I Think I Want To Go Cloud Based (For Business)

So what is this cloud? I have always had servers and they have worked fine.. . . Ok not so fine. Machines brake data gets lost monies are spent fixing / replacing them. They seem to age out so fast that I can not keep up with things and then the IT guy says I need to be running this or that new thing when what I have seems to be working just fine.

I am now going to be opening up a satellite office for my company and we will need access to the company data from both offices. In an ideal world I would like to move all my data to some server out on the internet and just have it be accessed through the network/web. The way I see it there may be a bit of a delay but with a couple of exceptions most files are small and I dont think anyone would notice. In an ideal world we would just change the network drives on the computers to point at the "directory" out on the web and people would nto really see any changes.

I am a small company we have 6-10 people but that changes up and down a bit depending on the season.

So what do I need to know / do? Is there just a data hosting place that will let me put data out there that I can access as if it was in my server in the office and then let me access it from two offices?

I REALLY like simple. So the simpler the better. In terms of security the data is not all that sensitive. Personnel files, payroll and what not are not on the server that we use for our design work. We have that stuff on a local machien that is backed up (and not connected to the internet). I don't have a need for huge security but I don't want it open to the web or anyone that just happens to stumble on it.

I will need 1 TB at a minimum and 2 would serve me well for a very long time. Restore points are a handy thing if that was part of the package it would be nice. Some times people make mistakes and it is nice to be able to go back and retrieve something that has over written. Not critical but I have had to do this every so often.

Anyone got any suggestions?

The cloud is a vague marketing buzzword which basically means "putting stuff online." There are times when it makes sense, but from what you describe it sounds like you need a VPN. This is what my office uses to connect the satellite offices to the home office, they can access all the same file shares, email servers etc. through the VPN. Security is fully under our control and there are no ongoing costs this way.

Edit: The best part is that this is a fairly simple solution, with little to no change needed to the home office setup.

Is this just file sharing? Database? Servers?

The big players AFAIK are AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure. I've played a little with both, but I'm far from an expert on either. As far as Azure is concerned, which I have more experience with, you can buy storage, virtual machines, database access, etc. all as different services.

There are also dedicated services on the cloud, eg Salesforce. It all really depends on what your needs are.

Invest in Zeppelin.

I just want a place on the web that I can set up as a place to have our job files and what not that can be accessed (and worked with) from either office. these are MS word, Excell and CAD files mostly.

I will have to look at a VPN but yes that sounds like it may be the answer.

You could also look into Dropbox for business.

The main question here is whether or not you are comfortable sharing your company's most initmate secrets with the Russian Mafia. And everybody else.

You mentioned how long 2TB will last you.

Generally, you're not going to buy for the future with most cloud services. With physical on-premises, you'd figure a server would be good for, say, five years. You'd look at what you need now in capacity, and what the history of your growth in capacity needs have been, add some headroom for the unexpected, and you'd buy that. With cloud services, one of the key advantages is that you'd buy what you need today. You'd get a little more tomorrow if you need it. You don't have to follow traditional hardware lifecycle management practices.

You didn't mention - are you in an industry with information security regulations, like healthcare or finance? Are you a Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, ChromeOS shop, or are you agnostic? Do you have an Active Directory domain? Do you use Microsoft Office?

Ms office and Autocad are 99.9 percent of it. Everything is Microsoft XP or 7.

Nothing is sensitive.

Current setup is a NAZ unit with Redundant drives for file sharing.

Dropbox for business sounds about right. Every single save of your file is held for 30 days in case you have an oops.. Easily restored from the Web interface.

I use it daily for large PDF and AutoCad files and word files with lots of photos (so big files). I am Not sure how it would deal with more than one person trying to access or edit one file at the same time. It also means your data usage will go up since the files are rewritten whenever they get saved.

HTH

Lots of options out there... I personally use google's cloud storage offering (and the whole google for business package). I'm browser based, so that makes the most sense for me.

In our office, we have a really fancy NAS setup that the developers and accounting department uses. Just about everyone else uses google drive. I recently set our legal department and other top brass up with the desktop app for google drive. It allows them to have a shared folder that they can all access and use their M$ software with. The syncing of files so far has been great. After a save, there is a delay of about 10 seconds for everyone to see the updated file in their "drive".

I know that dropbox and Microsoft have very similar setups and sync times (that ultimately depend on the speed of your internet and the size of the files). In my experience google and dropbox are the easiest to share files and folders with.

Something to consider with any solution would be if you care about version control, so that it actually stores all previous versions of the file. It could be as simple as a nightly backup, or just relying on google drive's "manage versions". I'm pretty sure MS's product does this too.

Cost can also be a factor, depending on the size of the storage you need. We pay $100/yr/user for google with unlimited storage and email. It looks like the others are similarly priced.

Architecting and selling storage solutions like this is what I do for a living.

Cloud can mean any number of things but at its root it just means "someone else's computer" so the most important thing to consider is who's computer are we talking about. I like to steer my customers to Microsoft Azure or Amazon S3 and occasionally Glacier. Those providers promise 13 nines of availability which means your data will be available 99.99999999999% of the time or 31,535,999.99999 seconds out of the 31,536,000 seconds in a year. The best on-premise, customer-owned storage equipment advertises six nines (99.9999%) of availability which translates to 31.5 seconds of unplanned downtime in a year. Now those are just crazy-stupid numbers that are large aggregates, but roughly-speaking we're talking about about 30x better availability when you're using cloud storage from the majors.

The costs that are involved, however, can make a big difference. Depending on your volume, the OPEX cost of the cloud provider can add up over time to be greater than an on-prem solution, but at the volumes you're talking about you're going to be roughly $0.05/GiB/month or right around $100. You can reduce that cost if you reduce the protection level -- I think it's Azure that does a nickle-a-gig for 3x geo-location but they have lower cost plans if you have fewer copies. If you stretch that out over 36 months, you're at about $3,600 which could buy you a low-end solution but won't get you anywhere near the availability that googlezon can provide. You're probably looking at a three-nine or four-nine solution at best in that price range and I'm being somewhat charitable.

Other costs to worry about are security, data sovereignty, transmission, and performance. Security is a big one, obviously, and it will depend on what kind of data you're working with. I will tell you that, if done right, the cloud can be made quite secure -- there are cloud solutions that are permitted for the storage of ITAR data. Data sovereignty comes in to play if you're working with data in other countries as many jurisdictions require that data created there has to stay there. Transmission can be a problem in that if you have an unreliable link, your workflow could get disrupted by link failures, plus you may need additional bandwidth to accommodate the additional traffic that used to be confined to the local network.

Performance is a big one that deserves its own paragraph. If you're just doing a couple spreadsheets here and there, it's not a real big deal. If you're working with project data where there are collections of many files, things get a bit stickier. Windows clients are typically going to be using CIFS to talk to a remote file server to pull data down. CIFS is a very chatty protocol that requires a lot of pre-game before the first bit of actual data is sent. When you're on a local network with sub-ms latencies, you'll almost never notice it. When you start sending that across the wide area, however, each one of those requests adds a few ms here and few there until you wind up taking 12 minutes to open up a CAD project (no exaggeration).

I typically direct customers to one of two products to solve these issues. My preferred solution is from an outfit called Panzura. They grew up in the engineering space and they've got a global file system controller that you can put at each location and it looks just like a Windows file server to the various clients. You create a share, map a drive to it, and then it works just like any other file server as far as the end users are concerned. On the back-end, you attach it to your favorite cloud provider and now you have a bottomless file server. As long as your cloud provider can keep allocating you additional storage, you'll never have a filesystem full message. The system also performs FIPS 140-2 encryption, deduplicates the data, and compresses the data before sending it to the cloud. This gets you the security you needs, provides a neat double-supeno protection, and reduces the amount of cloud storage that you need to pay for by typically 50%. You can also stop worrying about backup by having the system take snapshots of the data on a pre-defined schedule and storing them in the cloud as well. The appliances then talk to each other through whatever VPN or MPLS network that you have so that you reduce the time required to open any files by handling any of the CIFS traffic locally. Files that are modified in one location become immediately locked in every other location until the lock is released and then the new version of the file is available immediately, making it perfect for cross-site collaboration.

For smaller needs on a smaller budget, I like Copy.com (it's called CudaDrive now). That's from Barracuda Networks so it's all designed to be as simple as possible. It's kind of like the other filesharing apps out there, but it lets the administrator maintain control of the users and their data and it gives you access to shared filesystems stored in the cloud with the ability to have it as a folder in Windows explorer or through an app on your Android or Apple device. It's free for 15GiB per user and they have unlimited user plans for about $170/TiB/month. I'm a fan of Barracuda primarily because they've got a great focus on providing a top-notch product at a good price point designed such that you don't need a doctorate degree to manage.

Hope that helps.

"Cloud" is kinda a fuzzy term. It really seems to talk about hosted services that are automated in their provisioning and management, so that clients don't have to worry so much about the nuts and bolts of what they're doing. There are a lot of different things that can be done on computers, and as a result, there are a lot of different things that can be done on the cloud.

It sounds like you're after a cloud-based retail small business storage solution.

Some of the other conversations here are about things like cloud servers, cloud app hosting, cloud storage through an API, and such.

To that end, I'd look at Box or Dropbox for business for straight storage. Cloud productivity suites can reduce the number of credentials you have to manage and users have to remember. Productivity suites would include Office365, which can (depending on what you buy) include licenses for installable Office software, a cloud Exchange server, mobile device management, and OneDrive cloud storage. Another suite is Google Apps for Work, which includes Gmail, Google Drive, mobile device management, Google Docs.

You can probably get a trial of these services.