Cloud Drive for business

[irishbloke]

Does anyone have a recommendation for a cost effective cloud drive for storage for a business

I'd like to be able to restrict access to certain folders for certain employees and have a sensible monthly price

Does anyone have any experience or recommendations?

Thanks

Turlough

[surveyor]

Usual options are Dropbox and office365.

Not sure how easily you assign permissions though.

[Mr Overheads]

I use Dropbox for exactly this purpose.

My dropbox has everything, with hardcopy on my laptop harddrive AND a external backup harddrive for a secondary location.

Employees are given access to only the folders they need.

[andyb28]

We do this for customers with Office 365.

If you have / move your email to it, then the online cloud space is free for your company.
Yes, you can lock down folders per user.

[akirk]

Another dropbox user here - Synology box in one of the offices and Dropbox sync / backup.
You can lock either / both down as required and dropbox is useful in giving clients access when that is needed...

looked at One Drive as we have Office 365, but Microsoft still insist on using Sharepoint and treating every business as though they have 20 offices around the world and 1,000 staff - overkill for our needs, Dropbox is far far simpler and more intuitive...

[Fonzey]

akirk said:

looked at One Drive as we have Office 365, but Microsoft still insist on using Sharepoint and treating every business as though they have 20 offices around the world and 1,000 staff - overkill for our needs, Dropbox is far far simpler and more intuitive...

MS Teams would likely cover you for any small-office document storage or sharing needs.

SharePoint I agree is usually something that requires some degree of ongoing management and skills which a smaller company are unlikely to have, but the introduction of stuff like O365 Groups and Teams has made it pretty self-service and easy to use for non-IT people.

Generally I think if you ONLY want storage, then something like Dropbox makes sense. If you're looking to take advantage of stuff like e-mail, voip, etc then O365 is a no brainer.

[akirk]

Fonzey said:

akirk said:

looked at One Drive as we have Office 365, but Microsoft still insist on using Sharepoint and treating every business as though they have 20 offices around the world and 1,000 staff - overkill for our needs, Dropbox is far far simpler and more intuitive...

MS Teams would likely cover you for any small-office document storage or sharing needs.

SharePoint I agree is usually something that requires some degree of ongoing management and skills which a smaller company are unlikely to have, but the introduction of stuff like O365 Groups and Teams has made it pretty self-service and easy to use for non-IT people.

Generally I think if you ONLY want storage, then something like Dropbox makes sense. If you're looking to take advantage of stuff like e-mail, voip, etc then O365 is a no brainer.

I have over 30 years of working in IT and microsoft still frustrates me - they think from a corporate perspective, not from a small business perspective - yes those options can work, they are just not intuitive... if I then look at my clients who are not IT literate to the same level, there is no way that most of them want to be managing things on a Microsoft approach - dropbox is so much simpler - so we split the tasks - VOIP, we use voipfone / email = office365 and file management = dropbox - works well and no need for them all to be from one supplier

[Fonzey]

akirk said:

I have over 30 years of working in IT and microsoft still frustrates me - they think from a corporate perspective, not from a small business perspective - yes those options can work, they are just not intuitive... if I then look at my clients who are not IT literate to the same level, there is no way that most of them want to be managing things on a Microsoft approach - dropbox is so much simpler - so we split the tasks - VOIP, we use voipfone / email = office365 and file management = dropbox - works well and no need for them all to be from one supplier

I do agree, but they're getting there.

Teams is obviously combining files, IM and voice already - but outlook consolidation will come soon too and everything will just start to make a bit more sense for organisations that invest in the full suite. Unfortunately for MS, Google have been doing that pretty well for a while now.

If I setup a greenfield company tomorrow with <50 people and no dedicated IT function I'd have no issues deploying them into O365 - in fact we've done that for a few companies recently, but 18months ago I would be going Google/Dropbox/something else.

[bucksmanuk]

I use Livedrive, I’ve had no problems with it, but the reviews indicate some have!
Its £168/2 years for 2TB for me on a personal/business level but it is just me – one perosn.
We have Office 365 here on site, but that’s for 6,000 people. It works really well.

[ringram]

https://gsuite.google.com/

Google drive is easy to use. The do an office365 equiv.