Business wants to move 9,000 users home drives to onedrive and 15TB data to sharepoint

ok,

call my a cynic, but management has had an idea to move all users personal and shared data into the cloud

has anyone done this, or even thought about it

My gut instinct says no

The fear of change.

Just plug your own personal NAS drives into the local network

Onedrive or Onedrive for Business?

onedrive for business

It's just the thought of every user moving from a dedicated 1gb lan to a shared internet connection

assume appdata, desktop, internet favs, uev catalog remains the same

In which case you are not necessarily doing what you are worried about. ODfB runs on top of Sharepoint and can be implemented on-premises rather than in the Cloud (so an onsite private cloud service)

That's how we use it

Management want pure cloud, they don't know why, nor what problem they are trying to solve. They went on a Microsoft event day, and now want to implement it as it's cool and trendy.

Whats the current file IO on the servers in-prem hosting this data?
Now imagine that being shoved back and forth thru your firewall to the cloud.
Yes, One Drive can be configured for local caches, copies etc. but sounds like a mission to hell, at least at first.

How do they propose to do the migration?
Big Bang? [Switch off friday, Transfer TBs over the weekend and all users are go on Monday]
Phased implementation? [Groups of users moved across]
Side by side / parallel run? [Old fileshares and OneDrive coexist]

And before they go whacking all this data in the cloud, what controls are being put around it? I believe One Drive [for Business] allows you to share docs, directories etc with people outside the organisation.
Great for collaboration. Nightmare for Data Protection.

Also consider "Are you allowed to store all this in the cloud". You may have contracts with organisations which prohibit it. I know we do (we're looking at this too, and fortunately for me, I'm NOT involved in it ). You'd be amazed what financial clients say you can't do with their data [regardless of what they themselves do with their own data!]

None of that has been considered.

We've only just moved to a nice new file server platform. This project took months and is nigh on perfection. Super fast, security neat and tidy, great technologies working like data dedupe, shadow copies to a dedicated powervault. It's really good.

Now they want to change it all?

Firewall does DPI so good look with fast file access

Restoring thousands of file in the event of a ransomware infection could be troublesome, as far as I know, Microsoft don't have a good solution for that kind of scenario.

Management like it, as looking after ever increasing user data is an awful and expensive job and if you lose data on-prem then it's the CIO's fault. As long as everyone knows the risks and limitations and accepts it, then there's no reason not to.

why not meet them half way. Push shared data in to Onedrive and keep local user data on prem.

if you push back 100%, management will just make you do it and then blame you when its not 100% what they expect.

What do the management team think they'll gain from being on the cloud?

We tried moving 4gb to onedrive for business as a test to see how well it worked, every week we'd have to re-sync one of the libraries with all the users as one pc would stop syncing. Scrapped the project until the sync software is worked on to be more reliable.

swain90 said:

What do the management team think they'll gain from being on the cloud?

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Presumably cost-savings, better collaboration, workforce portability and ease of administration, plus "No more backups or File Server headaches".

skyripper said:

Presumably cost-savings, better collaboration, workforce portability and ease of administration, plus "No more backups or File Server headaches".

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a new £24,000 san and £100,000 dual san/lto6 backup system has been purchased within the last 12 months, not to mention six new file servers

We are doing the same, although where I work we have considerably more than 9000 users.

Giving users 1TB from the current 220mb will mean they will just squirrel away the information instead of utilising the new Sharepoint package.

I have little faith in the roll out team, the first user live was supposed to be 2 months ago and still they are pushing it back.

Steeps said:

We tried moving 4gb to onedrive for business as a test to see how well it worked, every week we'd have to re-sync one of the libraries with all the users as one pc would stop syncing. Scrapped the project until the sync software is worked on to be more reliable.

Click to expand...

That sounds like the users data is also stored on the PC (dont think the client supports network shares yet), we're not doing that. 100% Cloud baby

First thing to do it call up MS and disable onedrive sync. Its us useless for enterprise. Next thing to do it use iamcloud , it will map onedrive and SP document library as a mapped drive.

Also remember if it on 365 you have about 12-14 day back up.

Thanks,

what's everyone doing about the downloads folder? Currently it's redirected to our file server.

I find onedrive a headache speeds are awful as a consumer at least from my experience it is.

In doubt I am not paying for a business package and just using it for personal storage.

glen8 said:

That sounds like the users data is also stored on the PC (dont think the client supports network shares yet), we're not doing that. 100% Cloud baby

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That was the reason why we were recommended OFB, a handful of staff work remotely and might need to pull up the latest clinical paper/presentation without access to wifi, so OFB would sync all the files whenever there was a stable connection so the document library they had access to was always up to date. Nice idea, didn't work.