File Storage

It's funny how things never really change that much.  10 years ago the first thing I was dealing with was customer's electronic file storage and sharing challenges.  Now the challenge is still one of the main things I help my customers figure out.  The basic problem is that we have all this electronic information.  Some of it is important.  Some of it is private.  a lot of it is not worth hanging on to but we don't have the time to figure out which is which.

Today their are a lot of great new ways to address this problem.  Microsoft has taken their products put them in the cloud they are called Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite or BPOS for about  $10.00 per user per month. (http://www.managedsolution.com/CloudSolutions/thirtydaytrial.html) Google is providing Google Apps or more specifically Google Doc's and this comes standard with a free google account or the $4.75 per month per user price will get you their premium solution.  (http://docs.google.com/demo/edit?id=scAAFE2hvYCWG-9BtSKhcMXGD#document)

These tools are unique in that they will allow you to create your entire company file storage and email solution in the cloud.   The entry price is low so it's easy and painless to get on board.  There have been several large organizations that have adopted these solutions and there is definitely an ROI to be achieved.  So why are more small and medium businesses not diving in to this solution?

I've been using Google docs for over a year now as a personal solution and it works great. I'm also equally confident in the Microsoft solution.  I think that there is a great unknown that a lot of business can't get past.  What if things change?  What if these big players decide they want to change the price, or the platform or the whole game?  it could really cause some discomfort for a small or medium business that had just moved on board.  For those companies I wholeheartedly support the traditional client server model where the company installs a server and joins the computers up to the domain and keeps everything local.  (except the backup...but thats another blog for another day).

Bottom line is that there are more solutions than ever to provide secure shared storage of files.

Thanks ~pz