Where is your organization on it’s journey to the cloud?
In a way, the first real step towards cloud, for many organizations, may have been synchronizing your Active Directory (AD) with Azure. Before that, initial cloud storage use was likely departmental or for specific internal projects.
The biggest step, though, is moving to Office online. Office comes with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud file storage offering. A large organization will have at least 2 TB per user if not unlimited storage.
To take advantage of all that power, of course, on-premises data – home drives, personal drives, group drives – has to migrate. IT will likely schedule transfer over a weekend. One Monday morning, employees walk in and find themselves in the new world!
Office 365 and OneDrive have many interesting capabilities and benefits, including:
- Centralized management, compliance and security of files
- Basic sharing with employees
- Support for synchronizing with devices
There is one weakness in this infrastructure, however, which they quickly discover.
External sharing features are disabled.
Trying to use OneDrive to share files with folks outside your company like auditors, consultants, regulators, partners – even customers – is unfortunately a non-starter. The world is dangerous. Bad actors are constantly imitating OneDrive, GDrive, Box and Dropbox for nefarious purposes – like phishing.
The reality is that the sharing options built-in to OneDrive, GDrive, Dropbox etc are not designed for external users. Their use of their own domain (among other issues) makes them hard to verify.
So they’re usually blocked by the large or regulated enterprise.
To realize the cost savings from adopting the cloud, companies shut down on-premises storage and associated systems like legacy file sharing.
This leaves users with few, expensive options. Especially if they’re on a mission.
The e-Share platform is 100% cloud based, integrated with Office 365, OneDrive and other major cloud file storage services and re-branded with your company’s logo, colors and domain – so your links and notifications will not be blocked.
Schedule a demo to see how it can solve the external sharing problem, in a few hours, using applications you already use and cloud storage you already have.
(And if you still need to migrate some data from legacy on-premises and cloud storage systems to OneDrive or GDrive – we can help with that as well.)
