Utilize content collaboration as a service over legacy file servers

By Tresorit Team, May 02, 2019 content collaboration platform

Organizations heavily invest in establishing and maintaining an effective content collaboration platform. A while ago many IT departments took it upon themselves to develop a so-called in-house file server. A completely custom server built from the ground up. Designed to work as a file sharing and sync system. Back then it seemed as an ideal solution for their needs. It was tailor made for the organization and also all development was done via internal employees.

But since then a lot of things have changed. Cloud became not just an optional but for some organizations a necessary platform. In addition, mobility, ease of use, multi-platform support, and other quality of life features are now default requirements. This resulted in an ever-growing desire for a more personalized and customizable user experience. All in all, solutions must rapidly provide constant feature updates to keep up with customer demands. This is an extremely high standard and can pose a serious challenge as it puts great pressure and workload on IT departments.

Solely focusing on file server management could hinder back office efficiency as it takes attention away from numerous other pressing matters. Many organizations understand that content collaboration is a challenge that should be solved but also it should not consume the vast majority of IT resources.

As a solution, organizations often purposefully chose to completely get rid of their on-premise file server and all its associated problems. As an alternative solution organization utilize Content Collaboration Platform (CCP) as a service which helps them mitigate the IT department’s hardships. The final decision to go with CCP as a service is the end result of a number of variables. From which here are the most frequently reoccurring ones:

a) Legacy system replacement

Legacy file servers’ coding and configuration can age back even more than a decade. Since then countless significant IT function advancements were made and turned into common practices. Many of these legacy systems are not suited to adopt newer features and functions or require significant work arounds to accommodate them. In many instances using a legacy system as a foundation greatly penalizes improvement efforts. In some cases, it can completely jeopardize any form of progress and as a result it must be replaced by a more flexible solution.

b) Cutting down on hefty resource consumption

File server management require significant resource allocation. Depending on the way the server was built, and functions developed the level of resource usage may vary but, in all cases, it narrows down to how much money, time and employee work effort needs to be spent on maintenance, troubleshooting, recovery and replacement. Resource consumption could reach a certain point that it only generates losses for the organization. To mitigate expenses, it is a rational solution to invest in a service which can significantly cut down on resource consumption rates while offering a much more sophisticated enterprise-grade solution for less than quarter of the annual price.

c) Security with business efficiency

Keep file servers around, for many organizations, stems from the fear of granting the provider too much insight to their data. They had to make a choice between user convenience and information security. There are alternatives that offer both. There are CCP services that can guarantee zero knowledge by storing the organization’s business critical information in secure data vaults inaccessible by the provider. This way organizations can have all CCP ease of use benefits and in addition utilize high security.

d) Solving the scalability issue

Organizations can change and grow extremely fast. Yet in-house file servers weren’t necessarily meant to support changes done in a rapid session. The solution to support change is flexible scalability. Being able to increase the file server’s storage capacity and user count on the fly. CCP services were designed to support spontaneous changes this is embedded both in the provided technology and the corresponding pricing structures as well.

e) Transferring tasks and responsibilities to the service provider

When an organization outsources a certain function to a service provider, it mainly does it to transfer all associated tasks and responsibilities. Tasks mainly refer to operation, maintenance, troubleshooting and, long term support. While responsibilities consist of meeting industry and government-issued compliance requirements. Service providers take over all service associated duties and act as a guarantee that the utilized service meets all mandatory requirements and act as an insurance for the organization.