One feature many clients are looking for, especially real-estate and law firms, is a secure and easy way to share documents with external users, such as partners, clients, and vendors. For the primary user, it’s also convenient to be able to access files any time you’re away from the office.
A service like Egnyte now makes that a possibility. It allows you to store all your data in the Cloud and access it anywhere, as long as you know the login and you’re willing to install a small map-drive application. This gives you access to your documents wherever you are.
You can also give external users—perhaps a vendor or partner that you want to share a few documents with—access to certain designated folders. It’s as easy as signing in, creating a standard external user, picking the access you want to give them, and submitting the information. The external use will then be notified and given instructions on how to get to the file they need.
One drawback may be that retrieving data can be slow for employees working in the office full-time and accessing information from the Cloud. Fortunately, there are now local storage devices, such as Netgear Pro NAS, to sync up with Cloud data and provide local copies for office users. This is a nice package because it creates an automatic backup system—there’s a local copy and a Cloud copy. The redundancy couldn’t be better.