Have a potential new client that wants to move their file server portion of their 2019 AD controller to the cloud and eventually move all of their onsite servers to the cloud. The key is to be able to map network shares locally from the cloud server.
They have about 4TB of data with a growth of around 100GB / year
Can anyone recommend a service or company?
Am I better off spinning up a vultr instance and installing something like next cloud etc
It’s not about having data the cloud, it’s about how they need to access data in that cloud and at what speed. If they need access to large files then a local copy would be needed making the cloud more of a synced storage than a place where the data lives.
Having everything in “the cloud” is great, until it isn’t. As soon as your internet goes out for a couple of days, it definitely isn’t much fun. Hasn’t happened often since we switched, but very soon after rolling out Office 365 and a bunch of Azure services, our connection went dark for more than a full working day, and stayed spotty for several more days while the fiber carrier brought things back online.
This was in the middle of a semester so it really hindered classes.
We were able to log in, so they still have a local AD server, but you needed to get on your phone (wifi off) to get your email and pretty much everything else.
Yes we do have more than one ISP, but because of the location everything comes in the same cables. We are one drunk driver away from being down again, just a single power pole can cause major grief.
The reverse could be true if all your employees get sent home to wok, then having everything in the cloud can be a big benefit. Our biggest issue was telephones when that happened last year, all phones are on prem., and we don’t have phones that can VPN back into the campus by themselves. Also still many applications that are on campus servers and probably not going to move for a very long time. Databases, internal web based tools, etc. Didn’t have enough html to RDP licenses to really make things work well, some kind of hardware device and it wasn’t powerful enough to just add licenses.
They aren’t very large individually from what they told me. Can you recommend any services that would allow for this “cloud” file server to be mapped via network drive to their site?
I’m thinking maybe google drive and using a tool to map it as a network drive?
I would not use anything Google, privacy issues also consider data security. Remember don’t put all your eggs in one basket and and a SEAL axiom 2 is one 1 is none.
If a Windows environment, then maybe pop the data into Share Point and have the users accessing via One Drive?
Actual mapped drives is also possible with share point, but they aren’t recommended, and they do break every time Microsoft release new security features.
Else I’d suggest at least keeping a copy on prem of that data? You could always pop some server gear in a collocation data centre or rent a server and put the data there, then have your colleagues VPN to it, or set up a Direct Access server for a more seamless approach.