A story - A City in Canada is looking for a cloud solution for their Windows file servers
A municipal government in Canada with about 1300 employees and 40 TB of data on three local Windows file servers. Currently everyone uses a VPN to access file shares on the three file servers. Internal users sometimes create documents for themselves on a shared network drive that they have access to, and also create documents for external users who are outside vendors, contractors, merchants, and users who are not City employees. The IT department has only about 25 employees and they get a lot of VPN tickets. They would like to eliminate the VPN headaches. Employees also can not maintain an always-on VPN connection and sometimes they are in places where they do not have a good internet connection. They would also like offline access for employees in the field and for employees with poor Internet connections. Migrating 40 TB of data to the cloud would be a very lengthy process and would also require them to recreate existing folder permissions on shares. They simply do not have the bandwidth at this time to tackle such a project. They are also concerned about data sprawl since they now have to maintain data in two locations. They would like to find a solution that allows remote access to shares on local Windows file server shares and does not force them to migrate the data to the cloud.
