If you are reading this, odds are you don’t have enough hours in the day to manage a complicated set of systems to serve your team’s data needs. The simplicity and reliability of the system are key so you can get back to doing what you do best: running your business.

The two scenarios that follow are not for every setup, though they cover most small business environments I’ve seen over the years. If they do not fit your needs, feel free to use parts of them as a basis for your own setup.

Lighter Data Usage: The Cloud

If your team’s typical day is working with light files (PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, light databases, images, etc.), Dropbox may be for you.

Dropbox is a service allowing you to store, retrieve and share files in the cloud, meaning you and your team can access your files even when not physically at work. As files are modified, these changes are synchronized with the rest of the team. This takes away much of the stress that you may currently be going through when you have multiple versions of files across computers.

Dropbox’s Business plan is affordable and comes with as much storage as your team needs, advanced encryption, and unlimited file recovery and version history. Should you get the misfortune of being exposed to ransomware or hard drive failure, your data will be safe and can be backed up in no time.

You can control access to files as you see fit. A typical Dropbox folder structure at a small business would be:

• Finance folder, shared with your accounting team
• Support folder, shared with your support team
• Development folder, shared with your development team
• …and so forth

The one major drawback to Dropbox is when you are working with large files but do not have a fiber-optic Internet connection to synchronize them in a timely manner. Read on…

Heavier Data Usage: Network-attached Storage (NAS)

If you work with heavier files or with a large team, a local NAS may better suit your needs. This is a physical server that is purchased and connected to your network (hence the “network” part of the name).

Much like Dropbox, files and permissions can be set to your liking, but the files are on your local network. This means that file transfer speeds are much faster than over an Internet connection with a file hosting service such as Dropbox.

I have had enormous success with the Synology DS1515+ NAS. It’s a breeze to set up and their user interface is simple. It accepts up to 5 drives to create one large virtual drive, and supports many types of RAID. This means that if one of the 5 drives fails, your data is still completely safe due to data redundancy. I strongly recommend installing enterprise-grade hard drives (HDD) to lower as much as possible the risk of hard drive failure. Do not cheap out on drives for your server.

If your budget allows it, most servers accept solid-state drives (SSD), which read/write multiple times faster than traditional hard disk drives and do not have any moving parts. The same recommendation of opting for enterprise-grade drives remains. Again, do not cheap out on drives for your server.

The Synology server has tons of useful features such as time-backup (version control of files), external backup and automatic system updates to keep you far away from constantly having to manage the server and keeping overall maintenance costs very low.

Even if the server is local, it can synchronize certain folders of your choice with cloud-based file hosting services such as Dropbox, giving your team the flexibility to work remotely.

 

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment or write in!

---

I design and integrate systems using best practices so you can get back to working on your business. Learn more.