I work for Storage Made Easy, a software company with a mission to make it easier for users to access any of their file and object data stores from wherever they need to. This includes remote workers, and indeed over the last year, we've helped thousands of users access corporate data remotely for the first time. We are also seeing an increased adoption of object storage.

Working from the dining room was initially thought of as a temporary novel measure. That's no longer the case. Many organizations are planning hybrid workplaces where staff will alternate between working from home and from the office. Some are moving away from shared offices completely.

The mandate for organizations is to enable users to be productive whether remote or in the office. Despite the ubiquity of cloud applications, most of us work with file data to perform our job, and need to collaborate with others using those files. It's hard when our file shares are only accessible from the office. How can we access corporate data when outside the office?

NFS, SMB, and Shoulder Pads

NFS and SMB are block-based file server protocols, developed in the 1980s, that allowed networked computers to use shared storage. Unlike the neon clothes and shoulder pads of the 1980s, these block-based protocols are still very popular. They were designed for the local area networks at the time – networks with low latency, high reliability, and physically secure.

The internet as we know it kicked off in the 1990s (along with crop tops). Compared to local area networks that worked well with block-based protocols, the "Internet" has higher latency, less reliability, and operates over insecure third-party networks outside of corporate control. Fortunately in the 2000s internet friendly protocols were introduced (along with Athleisure wear). WebDAV was introduced for distributed authoring and later on the Amazon S3 API supporting object storage. These protocols, working over HTTPS, and dealing with files and objects rather than blocks, were much more suited for the internet.

So why didn't these internet-friendly storage protocols take off? In part, it's because desktop applications didn't support them but also because the protocols, and the APIs they support, are designed for applications, not users. Users need to be able to search, collaborate and lock files, to share links and sync for offline use. IT needs single-sign-on support and role-based access control. These capabilities were not a focus for these internet-friendly protocols.

Let's look in more detail at how users can work with file stores remotely.

Remote Work and Files

To work with files that are "offsite" requires locating files that are needed, downloading them, editing locally, and uploading. This has to be done securely, and it should be as seamless for the end-user as possible. Hint: emailing, copying files to a cloud service, or accessing file shares over VPN is not secure and not particularly seamless either!

Through our File Fabric platform users see and interact with corporate data as a single "global file system". They can search, browse, access and edit files they need through a single desktop drive for example with the actual files themselves stored in file and object data stores anywhere in the world. Features that the platform provides for remote work include:

• Global Search – Instant metadata and content search across all data stores.
• Cloud Drive – Access remote files as if they were on a local file system
• Cloud Edit – Open (and edit) files from a web app using the native desktop application
• Share Links – Providing secure internal and external collaboration
• Security – Ability to add enhanced security controls (e.g. 2FA, audit, SSO)

File Fabric provides these capabilities for both file and object storage, providing an option for our customers to migrate to object storage as they enable remote access.

Object Storage and Athleisurewear

This last year has been big for object storage (and Athleisure wear once again). Customers continue to look to object storage to realize operational cost savings and improve data security but they are finding additional use cases.

Once the data store for backup and archive data, companies are now storing machine and operational data in object storage, supporting initiatives with massive data demands like machine learning.

We are also seeing an increase in the use of object storage for file shares and home folders, supporting reflecting not only the recent increase in remote work but also an increase over time in distributed teams and collaboration.

Organizations are even releasing space formerly used for office-based file servers. They are moving to on-prem object storage in their data center, and to cloud services like Amazon S3.

Whatever fashion your storage takes it's nice to know that your teams will be able to work productivity, and collaboratively in and out of the office.

Author:

Steven Sweeting, Director Product Manager at Storage Made Easy.