The Business of Sync
A case study in making cloud storage efficient for business
Businesses use cloud storage to share effortlessly, across networks, machines and organizations. Teams use cloud storage to collaborate on projects internally and with clients, vendors and partners. Lots and lots of files are being generated in the cloud and stored in the cloud.
If you use cloud storage for your business, you have been stuck with 3 choices:
- Sync everything to your desktop
If you sync everything to your desktop, then you quickly find out that you will run out of disk space sooner than later. You may have 250 GBs of stuff in the cloud but you likely don’t have 250 GBs of effective storage inside your computer. As your computer disk storage is exhausted, your computer slows to a crawl, and work comes to a standstill. Dropbox is often associated with a sync-everything model.
2. Pre-select some folders to sync to your desktop
If your cloud storage — like Google Drive — allows you to selectively sync certain folders, then it leads to a poor user experience as it requires you to pre-declare what folders to sync and do it from a web interface, as opposed to the file system. It requires high coordination, and omniscient grasp of your file content and organization. Lots of back and forth between the web and the desktop file system. Very clunky and inefficient.
3. Download/upload via web browser
If your cloud storage does not have a sync client then you must access your files through a web browser. You must download and upload from the web; you must save the files to your file system; different versions are created. It is sub-optimal for business productivity. By all accounts, this is decidedly the worst choice. A popular cloud storage that does not offer its own sync client is Amazon Drive.
All three choices are bad for business.
There is a new choice for business to use cloud storage without limits and without compromises.
Infinite Sync from odrive
Businesses need better sync
I’ve written about the virtues — and problems — of sync in Sync Differently.
Sync gives you access to your files from your file system (Windows Explorer or Mac Finder), and allows you to work seamlessly with the cloud. It is a vastly superior experience than uploading and downloading files from a web browser.
Sync — the traditional kind— is great only for a short while and for a small content set. It’s not so great when you start ingesting and using a lot of files.
That pain is not felt when you are only sharing some files. The pain is felt when you start using cloud storage for storing everything which is what you’re inclined to do when cloud storage is cheap, plentiful and unlimited.
The laws of physics dictate that files take time to travel from there — the cloud — to here — your computer — and back there. When there are a lot of files to sync, the laws of physics will coalesce and put a beatdown on your use of cloud storage until it feels like your computer has caught the worst flu, with symptoms of slow, lethargic and unable to take down anymore files.
That pain is intensified when you’re a business. It’s pain, on a greater scale. It’s pain that has repercussions on the bottom line.
Businesses have to optimize computer performance and maximize productivity. They cannot afford to upgrade the storage on company laptops only to see computer disk storage getting maxed out yet again. There has to be a better way.
Infinite Sync makes it better for business
Businesses and their teams can now have sync access to all their content in the cloud — no matter how voluminous — at their desktop fingertips — no matter the size of their computer disk storage.
This is why Roaming Hunger purchased odrive Premium for the Experiential Marketing Agency arm of the company.
Roaming Hunger (http://roaminghunger.com/agency/) is the leading service provider for finding and hiring food trucks. Andrew heads the Agency unit, which leverages the food truck network to provide mobile marketing for clients big and small. He previously held similar brand and content marketing roles at startups and advertising agencies.
At Roaming Hunger, the Agency unit consists of designers, production and account members who all work with large files and store them in Dropbox. However, he knew from his prior jobs that access to files and productivity were going to face inevitable limits. Computer disk space will run out.
His team works on many different projects at any one time. They work with many large files that must be local while worked on. Quite simply, he needed a solution that enabled his team to have their very large files local as needed and removed when done, as part of a routine workflow.
odrive’s Infinite Sync enabled his team to sync down the right files as needed and on demand for any handful of projects. When a project is completed, an entire project folder is Unsync’d, and voila, computer disk storage is reclaimed. And then, onto the next project, and so on and on.
Andrew made the right choice to keep his team truckin’ along and not get bogged down by cloud storage.
Business lesson? It’s easier to upgrade your cloud storage than it is to upgrade laptops for your entire team.
See for yourself how odrive can help your business run without limits.
