Selecting a cloud file sharing vendor without IT participation is never a good idea

Many cloud-based services, including file-sharing platforms, allow business units to provision an accounts themselves and get started right away. This gives a impression that IT involvement is not required, and some vendors even encourage you to bypass your enterprise technology teams.

This approach can suffice initially, but with time, various problems typically emerge. Some potentially serious security, performance, and integration challenges can arise, but by that time, you may be locked in.

So as cloud-based file sharing becomes more strategic, enterprises are going to want to pay closer consideration to a range of broader issues, including data management, integration with other enterprise systems, performance, compliance, and security.

Therefore, even for the most basic file-sharing scenarios, you will almost surely want to turn to traditional IT advice and input. This should start with ensuring that your IT team participates in system selection and deployment — even for SaaS/cloud-based technologies.

In our forthcoming cloud file sharing and collaboration research stream, we explore these issues in detail, and provide detailed evaluations of the key vendors including Accellion, Box, Glasscubes, Huddle, Oxygen Cloud, Citrix ShareFile, EMC Syncplicity, SkyDox, and YouSendIt.

Excerpt from the Telligent Enterprise Evaluation

Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software Evaluation Stream looks at... Heavy traffic slows Community Server

"Like nearly all public-facing tools in this report, Community Server is bedeviled by allegations of poor performance under heavy traffic...."
(p. 289)

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Learn the real strengths and weaknesses of major Collaboration vendors from around the world, in our Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software evaluation research stream.

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