Addressing Office 365 and OneDrive migration issues

Posted:
10/05/2016
| By:
Guest Author

This blog post was contributed by a guest author from CentreStack

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s no surprise that Office 365 has been a raging success.  In the last few years, Microsoft has pivoted with incredible agility to become a cloud-computing powerhouse with the most pervasive enterprise cloud service (by user count).

Consider a few of the supporting stats:

  • Office 365 surpassed 1,000,000 subscribers in its first 100 days. That’s faster than ‘slouches’ like Dropbox and Facebook, which took 7 and 10 months, respectively.
  • In Q2 2016, more than 20% of all corporate employees used an Office 365 cloud service, up from 7% nine months prior.
  • More than 58.4% of all sensitive data stored in the cloud is stored in Office documents

And in an effort to land and expand, Microsoft has tightly integrated Office applications with the cloud.  For example, base Office subscriptions have been getting 1TB of OneDrive storage per user, which helps to explain its prevalence as a file sync and share application.

However, Microsoft has made a couple of architectural decisions for OneDrive that create headaches for enterprise users and their managed service providers as data is migrated from file servers to the cloud.

Get to know CentreStack

The first problem is that they use the common full 2-way sync strategy of syncing all data to every user and every device.

Syncing everything everywhere consumes unnecessary bandwidth and wastes storage on devices. These problems can have users complaining about slow data transfers, syncs that never complete, or devices running out of storage.

A better solution is to provide users with a view of the available data and then only synchronize the content that they are using. This is how CentreStack, a managed file sync and share platform, works.

The second problem is that file and folder management is user-centric; based on the more consumer oriented, peer-to-peer file sharing model. With the user-centric model, a folder is assigned an owner and that owner can share the folder with others. But what happens when the user leaves the organization? Now, you’ll have to transfer ownership to a new person who will then have to share the files with the original recipients.

The CentreStack platform provides traditional folder management based on access control lists and NTFS permissions using existing Active Directory identities. This avoids the difficulty of managing data ownership and control when users leave an organization that is using peer-to-peer file sharing.

We’ve continued to enhance our ConnectWise integration that now includes the following capabilities:

  • Document management with automatic migration of ticket documents
  • Central provisioning and management of managed file sync & share for customers
  • Automatic integration with billing and agreements

Please join us at IT Nation to discuss how a partnership with Gladinet can grow your cloud services practice area.

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