How Hosted File Sharing and FTP Help You Scale Effectively

How Hosted File Sharing & FTP Help You Scale Effectively

Even with all the strategic planning in the world, you can’t really know where your business will be in the future. It will ebb and flow over time; your workforce grows and changes and so do your file storage needs. That’s why you need a scalable file sharing solution to fit your business needs.

Hard-to-scale-ware

If you’re a small business, chances are you either can’t afford or can’t justify purchasing a server for data storage and retrieval. In-house servers require you to buy hardware costing thousands of dollars that’s sufficient for today but won’t meet your needs down the road.

A growing business means more files. And more files means you need a place to put them. If you outgrow your server, you’ll have to buy an upgrade. Or perhaps you buy a server that fits your current needs, but it still needs to be maintained and updated. This can leave you high and dry if there is an issue, unable to save files and leaving you frustrated.

Or maybe even worse, you invest the money to get an expensive piece of hardware, but your small team only uses a fraction of its capacity. Buying a server yourself can waste time and money that you don’t need to waste. As a small business, you simply can’t afford it.

Customization

In a world that wants to accommodate the most amount of people possible instead of supplying their individual needs, hosted file sharing lets you get exactly what you need when you need it. Whether you have five employees or 50,000, or you need an unlimited amount of storage, file sharing hosts like SmartFile can offer a plan that works for you.

A customized storage solution can be changed if you need to scale your business up or down. Typically, your monthly fee is based on the number of employees you need the solution to support, and the amount of storage you need.

But don’t worry if you need to make a change down the road; changes can be reflected instantly on your account. Simple as that.

On-Premises Scales Even Larger

Sometimes a business outgrows their office space and has employees working across the city or state. Or maybe as a global company, you have offices in different countries. Your file sharing solution needs to also have multiple storage options.

An on-premises solution like FileHub is hosted behind your firewall and designed to grow with you. It easily integrates into your network as a self-hosted file sharing and management tool. As your processes change, you can modify the existing user interface for a more efficient workflow that works for your situation. Who wouldn’t want ease with their side of enterprise file sharing?

As your organization grows, your time will be allocated to different tasks rather than others. An on-premises file sharing solution can scale with you by providing time-saving features, such as:

  • Quarterly updates to give you the newest features and customizations
  • Advanced global search to find any file on any attached storage
  • Compliance and audit trails.

File Share and Scale

Not sure where to start? Here are some tips to help you utilize file sharing while scaling:

Use your numbers. Your company probably uses financial projections to make decisions about operations, so why not use them to help you decide how much space is sufficient or how many users will need access to the file sharing solution. Your forecasted projections can help manage the size of your account or forecast when you need to adjust.

Have someone on your team dedicated to evaluating how you’re using your file sharing account and where the inefficiencies may be. Do you have too many versions of the same document? Does your file sharing solution also hold employees’ personal documents? Letting someone help you structure and consolidate your files is increasingly important as you scale.

Finally, know when to purge. Some people find it difficult to let go of files that may be of use sometime in the future. But trust us, that instruction manual for a software that doesn’t exist anymore probably won’t come in handy. Just because old files aren’t taking up physical space on your desk or in a cabinet, doesn’t mean they aren’t wasting space.

Whether you need a simple way to share files with clients and coworkers, instant access to your files even when you aren’t at the office, a reliable data backup solution, or all of these, a scalable hosted file sharing is one of the best investments a business can make.

How We Can Help

As file sharing experts, we know how to guide you through change and growth and provide you with the tools you need to do it. Give SmartFile a try for free today — no credit card required!

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