FileCloud Brings Remote Access to Employee Home Directories

June 25, 2014

Legacy FileServers In most of the large companies, employees have a personalized home folder and these folders are the default location for storing user data. Users will have access to their specific home directory as far as they are connected to company’s LAN. However, users can’t access their home directory from outside the organization’s network.  In an organization […]

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Legacy FileServers

In most of the large companies, employees have a personalized home folder and these folders are the default location for storing user data. Users will have access to their specific home directory as far as they are connected to company's LAN. However, users can't access their home directory from outside the organization's network.  In an organization like universities that has thousands of students,  requirement to access home directory from anywhere using any device has become even more critical.

Moreover, workforce in large enterprises has increasingly become global and mobile. In order to be competitive, enterprises are required to provide access to internal data from anywhere and ability.

Legacy FileServer

When talking to FileCloud, the head of IT of a mid-size company said:

"Game has changed. We are competing from companies across the globe. Our salesforce wants to collaborate with technical subject matter experts on the fly to respond to competition. I understand the importance of cloud access but we don’t want to put all our terabytes of data in a public cloud. It is not practical and we aren't sure if would be secure. We want to be nimble but we don’t know how... we want a solution that maintains current file servers systems but brings cloud access."

Above statement captures the dilemma companies are facing. Companies are uncomfortable to give up control of the valuable data and rely on outside vendors to protect the critical data that is company's backbone. Even if IT departments are convinced on the security of public cloud, it is not practical to upload every file to the cloud. Hence many companies are forced to maintain two systems: first, a legacy on-premises system with all the data and second, a Dropbox like solution to hold a small sub set of overall data that is accessible from anywhere. This kind of system creates data fragmentation and importantly, increases potential security risks.

 

Private Cloud Powered by FileCloud

FileCloud is a flexible solution that augments existing fileservers and provides the file access from anywhere and any device. FileCloud doesn’t need special hardware; it runs on existing infrastructure. Once setup, users can access their home directory from anywhere like any other cloud storage. Here are the key advantages of FileCloud.

 Access To Network folders

Users can access their home directory either via web browser using URL  or through FileCloud's leading mobile apps (rated 4+ stars), which are available across all major platforms iOS, Android and Windows Phone. In short, FileCloud brings cloud to home folders.

 Maintains Internal Permissions

FileCloud supports Active Directory and NTFS i.e FileCloud will import internal user and file permissions stored in NTFS. On the other hand, if businesses use solutions like Dropbox, they have to recreate access permissions in Dropbox, thus increasing the effort and complexity involved in providing cloud access. By honoring existing NTFS permissions, FileCloud saves a great deal of time and effort for system administrators.

 Smart Mount

Additionally, FileCloud provides Smart Mounts, an unique feature to assign network paths to groups of users without entering and matching each home folders to an end user in the group. This saves huge amount of time and efforts

Customer feedback: "We had over 2000 students in our system. Using FileCloud's SmartMount, we mapped homefolders for these students on FileCloud in just one step. Features like these help us move quickly to adopt private cloud. Thanks FileCloud!"

FileCloud vs. Legacy fileserver

 

FileCloud is built ground up to provide rich user experience. For example, users can mount the FileCloud access as a drive and can access, edit or upload, as if files are in their local drive.

In addition to huge list of user features, FileCloud comes with important tools and controls for administrators. For example, FileCloud comes with a set of mobile device management features to prevent data breaches. In case an employee loses her smartphone, admins can use FileCloud's mobile device management tools to remote wipe FileCloud data in that mobile device thus protecting critical company data.

To explore the features of Tonido FileCloud, please click here.

 

Image courtesy of phanlop88/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

By Team FileCloud