Return to blog


Content and the customer experience

People everywhere are talking about “the cloud”. From data and applications to complete IT infrastructure, transferring business processes to the cloud is finding a foothold in organisations around the world.

The benefits are clear, but you wouldn’t be alone if the whole concept of moving to the cloud gave you more than passing concern…

When considering the prospect of managing a valuable asset like your business documents through an online service, accessed solely via your Internet connection, many business owners are naturally concerned about issues of cloud computing security, reliability and control.

In reality, Software as a Service (SaaS) is no longer the untried and untested new-comer of the IT world. Hosted services, like fileplan, are built on state-of-the-art infrastructure that delivers a standard of security and performance far beyond what all but the world’s largest enterprises could hope to achieve in-house.

Here’s how we counter the top concerns business owners have raised with us when considering document management in the cloud.

  • “Will my documents really be secure?”
    fileplan runs on one of the most secure platforms available, Amazon Web Services, providing standards based protection against both physical and virtual threats. Your documents, encrypted at rest in the document store, and transferred securely using SSL, are separated from any other organisation using the service.  For added protection your documents are automatically stored in two seperate data centres.
  • “I don’t want to lose control of my data!”
    Although the physical infrastructure hosting your business documents is located outside your organisation, you retain full ownership of the data you manage through fileplan. Unlike many file sync or sharing applications, fileplan offers granular access control, making it easy to restrict access to teams or individual users right down to the folder level. As Administrator, you can grant or revoke user access at any time, and fileplan’s controlled approach to sharing.
  • “Can I expect reliable performance?”
    Concerns over the speed and availability of services delivered online can rely on you as much as it does on your provider. Through Amazon, fileplan provides geographically redundant, high availability storage, built to provide 99.99% up-time with no single point of failure. However, the performance you experience will also be affected by the quality of the Internet connection from your office to the outside world. Choosing an internet provider and connection capable of supporting the volume of data you expect to transfer to and from your selected service at an acceptable speed is a necessity.

Ultimately, unless you have already embraced SaaS and all the benefits it has to offer, implementing a hosted service for managing business documents will be a fundamental shift in the way you operate. So you should be sure that any questions are answered to your satisfaction.

Begin by considering the nature of your requirements – what volume of documents do you have? Who needs to access them? What legislation must you comply with (eg: Privacy Act) – then see how well each vendor can address your needs. fileplan’s Terms of Service will be a good place to start.

 

Download the Smart Guide to Managing Business Email