Hello all,
I'm looking for some advice/opinions on operating a small business entirely reliant on hosted/cloud services, with no local servers. Particularly, I'm interested in matter of user control/management.
We are looking at IT infrastructure for a new small business, with at least two office locations and circa 15 staff.
Those of us starting it up are coming from a very similar company, which uses traditional Windows Servers in each office (With independent fileserving, backup and domain controllers), but with VPN connecting the two for collaborative file sharing and accessing the exchange server at the main office.
This doesn't work too well for interoffice collaboration, which will be even more important in the new set up. We also want to explore better alternatives that reduce capital outlay and allow for scalable costs.
As we will be outsourcing support; we have been approaching IT support providers to supply and support a solution. Thus far, all seem to still be recommending the above and most seem reluctant to embrace alternatives (Possibly with good justification, but their answers aren't compelling at the moment and seem to more about doing themselves out of lucrative server support contracts).
What we are considering as a low cost option is making most use of hosted or other cloud based options. We were considering something like:
i) Hosted exchange for e-mail and calendar (Seems pretty straight forward);
ii) Some form of hybrid cloud solution, like that offered by Egnyte, with local caching/mirroring on low spec NAS boxes and synchronising between offices through a central 'cloud' file store. This isn't as robust for collaborative working as Windows Servers (file lock issues), but we can manage that;
iii) Rely on the cloud storage for day to day backup and file versioning, but maybe do periodic backups to external drives to take off-site, for piece of mind.
We will need to handle up to around 0.5TB of data and say 15 users across two offices in the medium term.
By taking this approach, we would have no Windows servers at all. The only function this loses that I can't seem to envisage a replacement for is user management. Without AD, I'm assuming that file access and e-mail would need to managed separately, with multiple credentials. On the face of it, this is small price to pay to avoid costs and hassles of servers.
I'd like opinions on other complications to the approach we are considering, or possible alternatives. Is hosted AD, without local replication, a complete non-starter?
I'm reluctant to go for a solution that requires and local servers (Beyond appliances like the NAS boxes). Even a simple a LDAP box introduces support burdens. I don't suppose there are any AD or LDAP standalone physical appliances are there; or maybe routers/firewalls with this function?
Any help, very much appreciated.
Thanks
John
I'm looking for some advice/opinions on operating a small business entirely reliant on hosted/cloud services, with no local servers. Particularly, I'm interested in matter of user control/management.
We are looking at IT infrastructure for a new small business, with at least two office locations and circa 15 staff.
Those of us starting it up are coming from a very similar company, which uses traditional Windows Servers in each office (With independent fileserving, backup and domain controllers), but with VPN connecting the two for collaborative file sharing and accessing the exchange server at the main office.
This doesn't work too well for interoffice collaboration, which will be even more important in the new set up. We also want to explore better alternatives that reduce capital outlay and allow for scalable costs.
As we will be outsourcing support; we have been approaching IT support providers to supply and support a solution. Thus far, all seem to still be recommending the above and most seem reluctant to embrace alternatives (Possibly with good justification, but their answers aren't compelling at the moment and seem to more about doing themselves out of lucrative server support contracts).
What we are considering as a low cost option is making most use of hosted or other cloud based options. We were considering something like:
i) Hosted exchange for e-mail and calendar (Seems pretty straight forward);
ii) Some form of hybrid cloud solution, like that offered by Egnyte, with local caching/mirroring on low spec NAS boxes and synchronising between offices through a central 'cloud' file store. This isn't as robust for collaborative working as Windows Servers (file lock issues), but we can manage that;
iii) Rely on the cloud storage for day to day backup and file versioning, but maybe do periodic backups to external drives to take off-site, for piece of mind.
We will need to handle up to around 0.5TB of data and say 15 users across two offices in the medium term.
By taking this approach, we would have no Windows servers at all. The only function this loses that I can't seem to envisage a replacement for is user management. Without AD, I'm assuming that file access and e-mail would need to managed separately, with multiple credentials. On the face of it, this is small price to pay to avoid costs and hassles of servers.
I'd like opinions on other complications to the approach we are considering, or possible alternatives. Is hosted AD, without local replication, a complete non-starter?
I'm reluctant to go for a solution that requires and local servers (Beyond appliances like the NAS boxes). Even a simple a LDAP box introduces support burdens. I don't suppose there are any AD or LDAP standalone physical appliances are there; or maybe routers/firewalls with this function?
Any help, very much appreciated.
Thanks
John
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