Do You Need Space in Your Office? You Should Consider Switching to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint
By: Joshua Weiss, Marketing Associate
According to Forbes, 74% of CFO’s say cloud computing had the most measurable impact on their business in 2017.
It is time to get rid of office servers or minimize the number of servers you have; you are unnecessarily increasing your companies’ risk. With on-premise servers, just like any other physical equipment, things tend to break. This can lead to the loss of valuable information, not to mention the time and money wasted on replacing the server. Even if the server doesn’t break, the typical life span of a server is 3-5 years. This means within five years of buying a server you will need to replace it. Your IT team or IT guy is already spending weeks planning for that replacement. How much is that costing you? On-premise servers over cloud-based options like OneDrive or SharePoint require more money spent along with more time wasted (due to installation and delivery of the servers) compared to these cloud-based alternatives.
So, if I want to reduce my costs and risk what should I do? Get OneDrive, SharePoint, or get an Office 365 Business Premium plan (1 year – $12.50 user/month) which includes both programs and more!
OneDrive is an internet-based storage platform that stores your documents in the cloud. While this can be purchased individually, Microsoft offers it to anyone with a Microsoft account. Microsoft offers it for free to its users with the free storage typically being around only 5 to 15 GB’s. For as little as 5$ per user/month you can get 1 TB of storage space.
SharePoint is a cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying the SharePoint Server on-premises, any business can subscribe to an Office 365 plan or the standalone SharePoint Online service. You and your employees can create sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers all without having to have a physical server on-premise.
While both are great tools for one to have, using them together is ideal. Both OneDrive and SharePoint allow its users to do things like a co-author, which is when multiple people simultaneously work on one document, and file share (both internal and external) all from the Microsoft Cloud. The real question is when you should use each of them.
For OneDrive, personal storage is the main goal. Everyone in the company gets their own OneDrive account, allowing them to safely save documents that are not meant to be shared such as personal documents or drafts that are not quite ready to be presented.
SharePoint on the other hand is typically best used to collaborate on files with others in your organization. SharePoint is also where you would go to publish your files for all to see.
Ideally, by using both OneDrive and SharePoint, a user can have a saved copy of their work on OneDrive until they are finished with it. Then they would upload it to SharePoint for everyone to see. This would also allow others to give input and even update the document from SharePoint.
Both OneDrive and SharePoint are very useful tools and are simply better options to have than just on-premise servers. Do more for your business, get OneDrive and SharePoint.
