Consumer Cloud Service Could Cost Your Business Dearly

Cloud storage: what’s good for consumers could be bad for businesses

For businesses, one of the biggest concerns about cloud-based service is security. Consumers are far less concerned about business security. With the rapid growth in popularity, many employees started using consumer cloud services for business because they like the simplicity of such services. However, consumer services will automatically sync business data to the cloud, and then to employees’ personal devices, which lack enterprise level protection. When data is spread across multiple devices, you not only lose control, but also are actually creating something that is less secure than an in-house solution.

Consumer cloud service could put your entire system at risk while adding only limited value

Popular consumer cloud storage services offer very limited features, many having just folder synchronization. Simplicity is their biggest appeal. However, being simple for consumers also means having fewer capabilities for business. Their limited features cannot replace your entire IT system. Businesses often need many people to share and collaborate on files, yet consumer services lack necessary security and management features. For example, Consumer services don’t have fine granular access control, and do not natively support existing security infrastructure such as Active Directory.

Consumer Folder Sync is a step back in managing your business data

Consumer folder sync service has many weaknesses - the first of which is not being scalable to hundreds of users. Also, syncing large amounts of data across many users and devices will be very inefficient; it wastes not only local storage space, but also network bandwidth. More importantly, simple sync is a step back in the way of managing business data.

Over the past few decades, businesses have learned to keep their data in central file servers. This way, they can easily control data access and security. When data is synced across multiple [personal] devices in different locations, you no longer have control over the data and your existing security infrastructure becomes irrelevant. DriveHQ cloud IT solution extends the central file server into the cloud; businesses can access all benefits of a cloud-based service without losing existing security features.

Businesses need both Simplicity and Advanced Features

In a decade of providing cloud service to businesses, DriveHQ has implemented many advanced security features to protect customer data without making the system too complicated.

For end users, our service is as easy as can be, especially by using our WebDAV Drive Mapping service or FileManager. Users can directly edit cloud files as if they are local; it is even easier than Folder Sync.

For IT managers, our cloud service mimics traditional IT systems. Coming from an IT background, you will find our cloud system compatible with your current in-house system. DriveHQ supports advanced user/group management and ACL-based fine granular access control. We also natively support Active Directory Integration and SSO. For enterprises that use Active Directory, it will be extremely easy to adopt our service while maintaining the existing security infrastructure.

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