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The Best Business Cloud Storage and File Sharing Providers for 2022

Storage and file-sharing are vital components of today'due south hybrid workplaces. Past selecting 1 of these 10, tested services, yous'll ensure that necessary files are deeply distributed throughout in-person and remote offices.

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Cloud storage is more than simply a place to drib your company'due south data. Sure, it's another drive letter where teams share files, just these platforms offering several other capabilities that local storage tin't. These features include elastic capacity, inline editing with multi-user versioning, and beefier security. Most of them too offer app integration with the residual of your cloud service portfolio, especially with other storage and business fill-in providers.

If your employees are withal working from habitation due to the pandemic, and peculiarly if that might become permanent, a cloud storage resources is a bedrock component when building a hybrid piece of work online collaboration space. It also helps if you're moving to a full-on desktop-equally-a-service (DaaS) surround. You'll need i of them not just to store and organize your data, but as well to handle basic collaboration, specially data protection and granular permissions. Integration means even if the master piece of work is being done in another app, such every bit Salesforce or Slack, all those benefits nevertheless utilise.

Unfortunately, that same breadth of capabilities can also present difficulties. The sheer number of features that vendors are offering to compete and differentiate themselves tin get in hard to zero in on what you demand. Still, there are some key considerations that anybody needs. For instance, any business cloud storage solution needs to be attainable, traceable, and secure. That means admission anywhere via the cloud, a log of who's accessed what and when, and a service that protects data with access command, backups, and encryption.

At the Information technology level, administrators need to know which cloud is housing their information and where those data centers are located. This tin be daunting non only because some vendors are reluctant to share this information, but also because many solutions rely on value-added resellers (VARs) to productize their cloud storage resource. That creates a back-cease morass where it can be difficult to determine where the bits are being stored. We'll discuss all these issues in more detail below.

The positive side to this ever-growing list of features is that smart organizations tin can notice new and artistic ways to use their storage infrastructure. Cloud storage ways you tin tweak a service so it acts as a lightweight document management organization or even a workflow managing director that controls how your data flows through a chain of users. Or you can focus on collaboration and file sharing features so employees can edit the aforementioned files in a team infinite while protecting their work with versioning.

This kind of customizability is more important at present than ever. Remote work is on the ascent, but employees moving away from a central office piece of work model tin drastically alter how piece of work gets washed. Storing and retrieving your visitor'due south data needs to adapt and no other storage method can handle those changes equally hands as a cloud service.

The rub is that effective customization requires planning, specially when that customization is around important workflows. Simply because a storage vendor has a long list of features doesn't mean you lot'll automatically have advantage of them all. Knowing what features will work best and in what combination is planning that only you, your IT staff, and your front-line business managers can exercise.

Focus your planning efforts on only central workflows at first and start small. Pay attention to core abilities, especially reliable accessibility, effective backups, secure storage, and user and group management. One time you know how you want all that to work while your workers are so widely distributed, and so you tin expand out into automated workflow, collaboration, and third-party app integrations. Sometimes core app integrations should be considered before, for example, if your business has standardized on a particular productivity platform. (i.east., Google shops will choose Google Bulldoze while Microsoft 365 outfits will probable select OneDrive).

Easy "Pluggability" Into Your Other Apps

If you don't have an obvious integration target like Google Workspace, the good news is that the cloud has made information technology easier for dissimilar vendors to talk to each other through open standards. These days yous tin mix and match cloud storage solutions with a long list of current productivity and certificate management systems. If yous have to go and then far as to do some custom coding, most vendors offering REST APIs and then you can both trade data and call upwardly functions between different app services. If all you need is meliorate automation, then services similar IFTTT or Zapier can let anyone build coss-app automation with a fairly low learning bend.

Cloud companies likewise see the value of interoperability, though they primarily try to address it in high-value customer categories and verticals. Vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce, for example, have huge partner ecosystems with large catalogs of targeted service offerings. A partner takes the company's core products, similar Microsoft 365, and builds integrations and workflow features using that product and ane or more than third-political party deject services. Those solutions are built to attract specific kinds of businesses or verticals.

Then, for instance, Vendor X might build an end-to-end lease management solution for big-city property direction companies. That solution might use a database of property listings linked to a Salesforce CRM. That link would match properties to potential renters. From there, information technology could automatically lucifer a renter blazon and a belongings type to the right lease template stored in another database or a contract or document management arrangement. Those leases get filled out using editable PDF documents that go dropped into an approval workflow either back in the Salesforce framework or some other productivity environment, like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

Of course, the more third-party services a solution similar that uses, the college the per-user-per-month price tag. But the fact that you lot can put such a customized solution together using just a plug-in cloud service architecture is attractive since it lets yous swap service vendors in and out pretty easily.

So if y'all're looking to utilise a cloud storage service in a very item way, certainly do the planning necessary to sympathize exactly what kinds of custom tweaks and workflows you'll need. But once that's done, don't assume you'll need to build all that yourself. Instead, start, bank check out the integration and value-add app marketplaces bachelor from your central app providers as well as those offered past the storage service. Someone may accept already built the perfect end-to-terminate solution for you, and that'due south cheaper and easier than rolling your own.

One reason backside the trend in new, value-add features is that storage chapters is largely a moot issue in the cloud. Many buyers start off focusing mainly on a vendor's storage capacity and how much they'll become for how many dollars. That's certainly nevertheless something to consider, but overall, storage space is now more affordable than ever with prices trending slowly downwardly. In terms of capacity, most cloud storage providers offer a generous amount of storage and in diverse tiers. Multiple terabytes (TB) are commonplace and no longer a big differentiator betwixt services, particularly at present that adding storage capacity is easy and cheap.

If yous of a sudden demand an extra 100GB of space for a fast project, most deject storage vendors brand calculation that chapters a elementary matter of clicking some option buttons. That'll not only give you the new space just besides automatically up your subscription charge accordingly. Even ameliorate, in one case the project is done and you don't need that 100GB anymore, y'all can ratchet both capacity and price back downward again merely as easily. This kind of elastic capacity is easy for a deject storage vendor and almost impossible for an on-premises resources.

Of course, all this freedom tin can once more make things complicated, especially in a larger visitor. If storage capacity and subscription rates leap around because department managers constantly change their requirements, that can play havoc with a long-term budget. Be sure to set up controls around who gets to suit chapters (your It section should be primal here), how new capacities should be reported, what the minimal security and permission requirements are, which backup policies need to use, and how often this tin happen in a given time slice (quarterly, annually, etc.).

Watch Those Details

All this paints a very rosy picture when it comes to designing your very own customized and highly distributed storage service. And while that'due south true, there are still several devils lurking in the details. A big i is finding out exactly where your data is. Some providers have their own data centers while others outsource their storage to another third-party deject, frequently Amazon Spider web Services (AWS) or a like Infrastructure-every bit-a-Service (IaaS) actor.

That's an important point to consider: Are you lot signing a service-level agreement (SLA) with a cloud provider that's directly responsible for the infrastructure or is the provider beholden to another party? If information technology's a 3rd party, make sure to investigate that firm and examine its track record. And so, expect at the levels of service it offers. While all the major players accept some level of uptime guarantee, it's worth noting that location is an important factor.

How many data centers does the third political party have? How many are local and how many are potentially in a completely dissimilar locale? If you're a US visitor, purchasing a storage resource with servers housed only in Europe makes piddling sense. Finally, is your data distributed among them for ameliorate reliability? You lot should exist able to determine those answers easily from a target vendor and designate where yous want your information stored so you tin can optimize your storage for admission speed and redundancy.

How your employees will access their files is not only critical, information technology can also vary widely amongst vendors. Sharing data functionality should involve a sync customer or some other kind of desktop-based software that resides on each PC or client and ensures that data in the cloud is synced with local replicas. But some vendors tin can have other points of access. For example, all cloud storage companies will offering a spider web client, merely some might besides make this the main client. Maybe that works for you and maybe it doesn't, merely it'southward something yous need to test before committing.

Mobile devices are also an issue. Many of those newly distributed employees are trying to use personal devices for work and many of those devices are mobile. Does your storage vendor have mobile clients? If then, y'all need to find out which platforms are supported and then test how those clients work. Syncing, for example, needs to office differently for mobile versus desktop since device CPU and storage resource are so unlike. Security and user access will besides work differently particularly if user credentials comprise device types.

Another matter to remember is that yous won't always be accessing your data directly through the storage vendor. For case, Microsoft OneDrive for Business organization can sync with Microsoft Teams, its team messaging platform, as well as the team sites that are part of its pop SharePoint Online collaboration platform. So your users might do their work on files in those apps and then see them automatically saved to an associated deject storage service, in this instance, OneDrive.

By comparison, Box (for Concern) offers a fully functional web customer with elevate-and-drop back up. Shared information tin be stored in folders originated past individuals or in team folders created and controlled past squad leads or administrators, just it all happens in a browser window. Making it happen within another app will take more than work unless Box pre-builds the integration for yous.

For almost any real workflow, yous'll need some version of team folders, so how that works not just in the storage vendor's interface only also any associated tertiary-political party apps needs to be considered carefully before buy. Working with users hither to determine what they like all-time and how they're getting piece of work done today tin can go a long way towards making your purchase decision easier.

How user and grouping folders piece of work is what you'll demand to determine, not just if the solution supports that feature. What features are supported, how they're controlled, and which third-political party apps they can affect are all important points. Several solutions go above and beyond the call of duty and incorporate tight integration with popular third-political party platforms, such every bit the same Microsoft 365. For example, even Microsoft rival, Google, has congenital a Google Drive Enterprise connector to comprise polish collaboration functionality for Microsoft 365 users.

Look for Deep, Layered Security

Maybe the most important storage devil you'll need to wrestle with is security. Keeping data safe is a more meaning challenge today than it's e'er been. Features that were in one case considered advanced are now just baseline capabilities. Enterprise-grade identity management, for example, is something every storage vendor should offering. That means not only matching an private user's credentials against what files and folders they're allowed to access, but also calculation multi-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) features, also.

As mentioned above, secure storage means protecting information from more than prying optics. Redundant storage layers mean yous should exist able to map which data centers house not just the primary copy of your data, but the first backup tier, too. Then if you lot've got 500GB of information with Vendor X, then you should exist able to house the files your employees access the well-nigh in data centers close to where they're working. And then Vendor X should besides allow you to sync those files with a copy located in another information center, one still operated by that vendor, and so should your primary case get down, another information copy can exist immediately available.

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Vendor X should also perform regular backups of both sites and store that data in a different location. Finally, yous should be able to get integration with a tertiary-party deject backup provider so yous can automatically perform yet another backup on your own and store that on servers from an entirely different vendor or even your on-bounds server or network-attached storage (NAS) device.

That may sound like overkill, merely the dazzler of a managed cloud service is that this kind of tiered architecture is relatively easy to build from the customer's standpoint and fairly automatic once it's established. As long as you test it every once in a while, you tin can rest assured that no affair what happens, your data will stay prophylactic and accessible.

Encryption is another bedrock security feature. All our tested vendors supported this to varying degrees, but should you lot encounter i that doesn't just continue looking. Encryption is a must-accept and y'all need it both while the data is moving between your users and the deject also equally when information technology gets to those deject servers and stops moving. So both "in transit" and "at rest." Testing these capabilities means understanding the encryption schemes being used as well as their bear on on data retrieval performance.

Fortunately, cloud storage providers are working difficult to shore up security to go on your bits safe and compete with one another. So much so that most It professionals trust deject security as much or more than what's available on-premises (64 percent according to a 2015 survey by the Cloud Security Alliance(Opens in a new window)). The logic is fairly uncomplicated. Virtually It professionals merely don't have the budget to research, deploy, and manage the advanced security capabilities that deject service vendors can provide considering it'south key to their primary business.

Important Regulatory Compliance Features

Aside from simply keeping customer data safe, some other factor that's bolstered cloud security significantly is the need to comply with important regulatory standards, such as the Wellness Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and ISO 27001. Livedrive for Business is somewhat atypical here because it's focused on European customers so it's built around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is why its servers are located in the EU and United kingdom.

Regulatory requirements are generally determined by your legal staff, and you'll demand to factor them into your planning. Cloud storage providers normally have several features built-in specifically to address compliance issues.

For example, every file and folder must have an audit trail. This highlights when it was first stored on the system, how and when it's been modified, who accessed it, and what kinds of operations were performed, like copying, deleting, or moving. This is paramount for the more heavily regulated or security-conscious verticals. Due to mistakes or misconduct, losing mission-critical files can often cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in reparations or lost majuscule.

File memory is another mutual legal requirement. You need to control how long data lives on the arrangement, how it'south accessible, and when information technology can be deleted or archived. And your storage provider should brand these features easy to utilize. Having the right information on hand can often hateful the difference between beingness in or out of compliance with federal or industry-specific regulations in heavily regulated industries.

All of this means that earlier you purchase whatever cloud service, you demand to sit with your Information technology staff and your compliance practiced to understand exactly where data and apps need to be located and what features they need to support to pass the compliance regulations important to your business.

One Step at a Time

Choosing a cloud storage production for your organisation can seem like a daunting task when you outset consider all of the variables involved. Not but practice different businesses have varying cloud storage and file sharing requirements, they demand solid security for file backups and sharing. Striking a balance betwixt usability, security, and customization ultimately needs to exist driven past business organisation requirements. But understanding exactly what those requirements are is a serious job that will crave real work; information technology's not something you want to address with a snap determination.

While some of the vendors we reviewed make it easier to migrate your data off of their service, not all of them are then thoughtful. Once you've signed up and moved your data onto a particular service, it's generally not piddling to motion it to another, so information technology'south a good idea to practice your homework thoroughly before committing to any one provider.

Planning is the central. So sit downward with business organization leads, IT managers, and fifty-fifty a representative from the cloud provider if yous can. It'll take some fourth dimension and effort, simply going to the trouble of mapping out the features necessary for your system's electric current and time to come needs will brand finding the right solution much easier.

For more on business software, cheque out The Best CRM Software and The All-time Email Marketing Software.

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