This year gave a new boost to the remote workspace trend. While it was the only solution to keep businesses running, business leaders had to adapt to the new conditions and build the remote environment. Despite initially being an emergency measure, it will have a long-term impact and post COVID-19 telecommuting will stay in demand.
Shifting to working from home calls for infrastructural changes to allow employees to utilize the corporate tools they use to perform their duties. Access to internal files is one of the core requirements to make remote work possible.
Here’s where distributed file systems (aka DFS) come in handy, as with their use you can store the necessary data on several file server instances. Let’s check out the benefits of implementing DFS in your business.
Easy Access
With distributed storage, data access is easier than ever. If a user logs into their profile, the home directory with all the required files and folders is loaded automatically. So, you don’t need to know the exact file path to access it. It’s extremely useful when you need to reach the working environment outside the office when traveling or working from home. Some solutions make it possible to connect to a remote file server without using a VPN, which is extremely useful when the quality of connection is less than ideal.
Higher Uptime Compared to the Centralized Solutions
As the files are stored on several physical servers, and often across more than one location, the reliability is higher. If something goes wrong with one component (like an outage, a disk failure, or any other hardware issue), it will not affect the other nodes connected to the system. The files will still be accessible just loaded from another environment. So, with the DFS, you can achieve better storage uptime.
Fast and Efficient File Collaboration
While many businesses start with traditional file sharing solutions like Dropbox or Google, they soon realize that it’s not the best choice due to the loading delays when several people are working on some heavy file at once. Moreover, traditional file drives may not be suitable for business needs as it’s hard to customize them, check all the logs, and easily manage the group access. With DFS, these concerns are addressed as it’s possible to control the permissions from the active directory granting all the necessary file access based on the user role, so your employees do not need to wait until the file owner shares the personal access by email.
Stress-Free Maintenance
It’s easy to keep the system in good health and install all the required updates at any time without any disruptions to working processes. Since the storage is distributed, you can take care of separate nodes one by one because while one node is being rebooted or turned off, the data will be fetched from other servers in the network. This means there is no need to take time out of your employee’s day for emergency maintenance and there is no need to schedule updates outside of work hours.
Data Integrity
The principle of data redundancy ensures that you will never face the issue of losing important information as there’s always a backup on the other servers that are used to replicate the information. Thus, in unfortunate cases of a disk failure, with DFS, you have your back covered.
Of course, DFS as with any technological solution, has some issues to address. The most common challenges include maintaining a distributed environment and the threat of data leakage. The greater the number of servers containing the same data, the higher the security risks. But with proper system management and the technical expertise of your IT personnel, these issues can be easily mitigated. So, you can enjoy all the benefits of adopting DFS for your business in full capacity.
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