Love or hate it. The cloud is very price competitive for its offerings. Sharepoint Online is one classico. When you subscribe to M365 Business Basic (formerly known as O365 Business Essentials), you get swamped by 1TB of storage space in OneDrive for Business and another 1TB of storage space in Sharepoint Online Plan 1 (this is a little known fact among O365 users) .
It kills almost any thoughts of getting a NAS or getting a Windows Server for file sharing. True enough, you enjoy the privacy of data in your on-premise. But you will need to upkeep traditionally. The big wave is going I.T. asset-lite and work anywhere. Of course, you need to adjust to the usage behaviour.
- You need a Windows 10 machine. This is to enjoy Onedrive for Business “File on Demand” file. This keeps demand on your device’s storage low. And you get to access all your files in OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint Online sites.
- You need to have internet access to access files.
- You need to specify certain files to keep on device (works only with Windows 10 and Onedrive sync client) and then you can work offline with documents.
- You need to use Word / Excel / Powerpoint Online (opens in browser) to work with shared documents.
To better the offer, Microsoft just increased 20x user storage allocation for Sharepoint Online ! 20x increase #SharepointOnline !
If you have 2 users, you now get 1TB + 10GB x 2 user and that makes 1020GB of shared organisation storage space. For media content creators, it is not enough. (I will write about it some time in future)
What is most important now ? #COVID19 work from home arrangements. Your colleagues can now access files , documents from their home easily from any device, anywhere with Internet access.
Do you think investing in a NAS or Windows File Server is wise ? Are you willing to change ?