Cloud File Server in Microsoft Office 365

Cloud Computing Trend

Over the past several years, cloud computing has dramatically increased in popularity, finally delivering on the initial hype it began receiving back in the early 2000s. Today, some companies run their entire businesses in the cloud and just about every business has some portion of their IT infrastructure on a cloud platform. According to the 2023 “State of the Cloud” Survey by cloud management company Flexera, 87 percent of organizations are run in the multi-cloud. Initially, the first on-premises workload to move to the cloud was backup, due to the scalability, cost efficiency, security, and reliability that the cloud provides a storage platform. Today, the cloud has proven to be a beneficial storage platform that it’s even gaining popularity as a primary cloud file server solution.

Features of Cloud File Server

Collaboration in the Workplace

Collaboration is the second driver that has further fueled the popularity of the cloud overall, as well as specifically for cloud storage. Collaboration and file hosting applications like Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, G-Suite, and Microsoft Office 365 facilitate easy sharing between colleagues and partners, regardless of location. Not surprisingly, Office 365 is one of the most popular cloud computing solutions on the market today, with more than 120 million monthly active business users.

Primary Storage

The major accomplishment with this trend is that it has finally pushed IT managers to get over their initial skepticism regarding the viability and security of storing data in the cloud, thereby paving the way for explosive growth in the cloud as a primary storage platform. In fact, per Statista, in 2021 the storage capacity of data centers stood at 2,060 exabytes worldwide with 360 exabytes being consumed by collaboration activities and data – and that figure continues to grow every day.

Ease of Management

With Office 365, users and their IT departments gain the general benefits of the cloud. Office 365 takes Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office Suite – including Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – and delivers them in the cloud, eliminating the need for users to procure and maintain their own hardware, manage patches, or worry about updates to the programs. From an IT perspective, the included cloud storage eliminates the potential for data loss from hardware failures and site-wide disasters, local files stored outside the visibility and control of IT, and complicated multi-site storage, replication, and file sharing requirements.

Hybrid Cloud File Services

In addition to cloud access to the Office programs, all subscription levels to Office 365 include 1TB of storage on OneDrive for each user and 1TB of storage on a SharePoint backend to provide storage and sharing across locations to all users with an Office 365 login. With so much cloud storage included and all of the benefits, it begs the question: Why do I still need an on-premises file server? There are many reasons a company will still want an on-premises storage solution as shown in the table below. Morro Data CloudNAS provides all the benefits of the cloud and the advantages of on-premises storage at an affordable price point, and it comes with Azure AD for easy integration with Office 365 user Identity Management. Morro Data CloudNAS with Azure AD support is the right complement to Office 365 for on-premises File Storage with a familiar Drive Letter user experience.