Whether your needs are best met by migrating to a public cloud, a private cloud, or an on-premise file server, Triofox lets you maximize productivity without sacrificing control, security, or data protection.
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.
With Active Directory, employees can log in to corporate machines with one single set of credentials.
Drive mapping is probably the most frequently used feature from end-users when then login to their Windows workstation.
With Windows storage space direct, Windows file servers can be pooled together to increase the storage capacity and grow on demand.
The NTFS file system brings the permission structure to folders and files with well-understood security control.
File locking is another frequently used feature from NTFS and the CIFS/SMB protocol to lock files while they are being edited.
With the virtual machine technology, Windows file servers can be available from AWS, Windows Azure and various other data center locations.
There are so many Windows file server features that we use and love. However, when it comes to storage services and applications, there is also Office 365 OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Azure Files, Dropbox, Box, ShareFile, and other public cloud storage services that compete with Windows file servers for your data. These services may make Windows file server irrelevant in the future.
Should you abandon your Windows file server and adopt these public cloud storage services? Or should we add modern cloud services to Windows file servers and take the file servers back to the future!
Cloud storage migration typically begins with copying and migrating file server data content to third-party storage services.
Some applications can not be moved, and you have invested a lot in the past, from user experience to licensing costs.
Cloud storage adoption typically starts with a small percentage of employees and a small percentage of use cases. When file server content and cloud storage content coexist, the problems arise.
Neither VPN, FTP nor WebDAV are the right solution for Windows file servers. Your mobile workforce prefers a Dropbox- or OneDrive-like modern access solution that combines web browser, desktop/laptop and mobile access.
Triofox integrates web browser, desktop/laptop and mobile access with data protection and cloud migration for your Windows file servers!
Gladinet Triofox can be used by enterprises to quickly provide secure remote access and mobile access to file servers without using a VPN. It can also avoid tedious copying or syncing to external storage services like Office 365, Dropbox, or Box. Later, Triofox can leverage more from the cloud for business continuity.
In these times of global pandemics, where more and more companies are distancing themselves socially, we are certainly seeing more interest in faster ways to facilitate working from home without compromising data privacy, security, or compliance.
So we strongly encourage you to use Triofox and all the other resources available to you to make remote working easier. For example, Triofox's ability to facilitate remote access to file servers could be critical for a company that relies on internal file servers.
Triofox creates a web server front-end that accepts client agent requests from remote Windows, Mac, web browser, iOS, and Android devices. The client agents provide drive mapping functionality.
Client agents send HTTPS/SSL requests to the Triofox server. The Triofox server can log the requests for auditing purposes and also coordinate file access and sharing demands.
Triofox checks the Active Directory and NTFS permissions to see if the file requests are allowed. After that, the file requests are satisfied and returned to the client agents via HTTPS/SSL.