The ability to store and sync media in the cloud is one of the most significant advances in the technology of the last several decades. The convenience and flexibility that cloud storage provides has revolutionized how we do business. At its essence, the cloud allows you to share and access data files from anywhere easily and quickly restore them if there is an issue.
Most people remember the hassles of trying to collaborate on a document before the cloud. If you sent a document to multiple people, changes were made in one of two ways. Either everyone made their changes to the original and sent it back, making a final edited copy nearly impossible. Sendung a document from person to person was incredibly time-consuming. It could result in a game of “document-telephone” – whereby the final document didn’t even resemble the original writer’s product. Online file storage and syncing services in the cloud have completely changed our document sharing reality.
Quick Review: The Cloud
Storing your files in the “cloud” means locating your files someplace other than your hard drive, typically to a service provider’s servers. Keeping data in the cloud allows the user to access files through the internet. While old-school backups generated full-scale uploads, today’s services typically identify only the minor changes made and make those changes in the cloud.
Is data safe in the cloud? Data is generally encrypted before making its way to the provider’s servers, and it remains encrypted on those servers.
File syncing and storage services offer seamless access to Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets, or photos. You can now access work files from home – or personal photos from your work phone. With cloud syncing, you can access your files from your work computer, your home laptop, and the tablet you keep in your briefcase. Syncing and storage services enhance your online security by automatically generating backup files. If your computer is lost or destroyed, your files and data are still accessible to you. You can imagine the benefit this represents to organizations that have embraced the reality of a remote workforce.
How is Cloud Storage Beneficial?
The optimal cloud storage solutions interact easily with other apps and services, ensuring that viewing and editing your files is intuitive and efficient. Especially in a business environment, you’ll need your software apps to have the capability to access and retrieve your files. Choosing a service that authenticates and integrates with your complete toolbox is imperative.
The array of available cloud-based storage services is diverse, typically specializing in a niche market. Dropbox targets synced folder access, for instance. But other popular cloud storage services, such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, offer more general services, including folder and file syncing as well as media-playing and device syncing. These products also act as collaboration software applications, providing real-time document co-editing and solving our problem as stated above.
By their very nature, most cloud services provide backup. However, there are storage services that solely specialize in data protection and recovery. These services, such as Carbonite, create a disk image of your computer. While syncing only allows for file restoration, cloud storage services allow for file restoration as well as the recovery of all system settings and programs.
Alliance IT provides the technology, the servers and the knowledge base needed to transform your business, utilizing cloud technology to streamline, organize and protect your data. Call us today to learn more.
