As remote work has become more prevalent over the last couple of years, having a web-based file sharing platform has become more important than ever. Ensuring your team has access to the files they need from anywhere is important to their productivity. Microsoft has 3 different solutions. This may seem confusing, but they all serve different purposes and markets. We’ll take a quick look at Microsoft One Drive vs. SharePoint vs Azure Files.
Target Audience
These three products exist because they were built for very different audiences. One Drive was really created for an individual user to be able to have their files anywhere on any device.
SharePoint was built for team collaboration. It has functionality for building internal communication websites, as well as sharing files. SharePoint is tailored to small and medium business.
Finally Azure files is a great solution for web-based file sharing for companies with robust and complex file sharing needs or for enterprise companies. Azure files are only one part of the Azure ecosystem that can also house hosted servers and applications.
One Drive
The idea behind one drive is to give you a single place to store, share, and sync your files. Essentially you can designate specific files and folders on your hard drive to sync to the one drive cloud. Once they are synced up you have a copy that you can access via one drive from any device.
One Drive is also commonly used as an offsite copy of data saved locally on your hard drive. While it isn’t a backup solution, the copy that lives in the cloud can be very handy if your hard drive dies.
One of the great things with the Office 365 suite is that the products were built with integration. Say you started working on a file locally but realize that you should share it with your team. You can move a file from your personal one drive to SharePoint and set file permissions with just a few clicks.
One Drive does have a few limitations that you should keep in mind. The storage limit is 1TB of space. You can purchase additional space if needed. No individual file above 100GB can be uploaded or synced to One Drive. When using onedrive.com, you can only copy up to 2500 files at one time.
SharePoint
WME had a succinct explanation of what SharePoint does that I liked a lot.
- SharePoint is a customizable web application that can integrate with other Microsoft services and applications, such as Outlook, Teams, Microsoft Viva, OneDrive for Business, and more.
- SharePoint can store documents for your organization, host internal web pages, and house checklists for teams to work on.
- SharePoint can be used to create advanced custom workflows to accelerate your business growth, such as tracking leads, sales, orders, or internal projects.
The main idea behind SharePoint is to facilitate team collaboration and access to files. It’s used frequently by small and medium businesses to do just that. It’s a very customizable solution and can be easily tailored to your specific needs.
SharePoint does have some limits that you should be aware of. It is not a server. It cannot run Windows Software. You’ll need a hosted server with Azure to do that in the cloud.
SharePoint also has a 5000-limit item threshold. That means that you cannot retrieve more than 5000 items or files at a time in a single view. This can be resolved/worked around a few different ways. You can create subfolders, or additional libraries to split up the data. Enterprise organizations may easily bump into this limit and should look to Azure files for a more robust solution.
Azure Files
Azure files is a robust full featured cloud file sharing system designed for the enterprise. It allows you to migrate existing on-premises file share to Azure without having to recreate complex permissions or file structures. The solution is also built for enterprise, so it can house much larger complex data sets and doesn’t have the same limitation of SharePoint.
In addition, Azure files lives within the greater Azure ecosystem, so if you have applications that need to access files on the file share you can host your application servers in Azure as well to facilitate access.
Another advantage of Azure files is that you can configure Azure file sync. One of the challenges of any cloud file sharing solution is the latency that can occur when users are trying to access large files. Their internet connection speeds can also be a factor. To aid in performance Azure sync uses your local file share as a fast cache for that data, and then syncs it up to the Azure cloud. This allows users to have fast access to even large files, and global organizations to have one centralized place for their data.
The end user experience of Azure files offers the path of least resistance for IT admins as it essentially ties into windows explorer which is the interface most users are familiar with.
The drawbacks to Azure files are what you usually find for solutions built for enterprise. Cost and complexity. There is quite a bit of configuration that needs to be done to set up Azure files, and you’ll need an experienced system administrator.
Conclusion
There is a solution for every problem. Microsoft designed One Drive, SharePoint, and Azure files to address the different cloud-based file sharing needs of their clients. Each organization is different and the solution that’s right for you may vary. We recommend consulting with a cloud services expert from out team at i.t.NOW to find out what’s right for your business.
Give us a call today! We’re anxious to help.
