NAS or Cloud Storage? How to Pick the Right Home for Your Office Files

NAS vs cloud storage for business

In many growing offices, company files live in too many places: personal laptops, pen drives, old shared PCs and private cloud accounts. When a device fails, the data goes with it. People waste time hunting for the latest version, nobody controls who can open what, and one ransomware infection can reach everything. The fix is one managed place for files. The two usual choices are a NAS or cloud storage.

Where each option fits

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a dedicated device in your office that holds several hard drives in a RAID setup and is reached over the office LAN. Cloud storage keeps files with an online service that staff can reach from anywhere.

  • NAS suits office-based teams that work with large design, CAD, video or scanned files, or offices with limited internet bandwidth. It is a one-time hardware cost, but it needs firmware updates, drive monitoring, a UPS and an offsite backup.
  • Cloud suits distributed and remote teams that edit documents together. There is no hardware to maintain and version history is built in, but large files depend on internet speed and per-user fees add up.
  • A hybrid setup is also valid: NAS for large files, cloud for daily documents, and a cloud backup of the NAS.

Do not skip backup

RAID protects against a single drive failure. It does not protect against deletion, ransomware, theft or fire. The article recommends the 3-2-1 approach: three copies of data, on two types of media, with one copy offsite. It also warns against consumer-grade devices, overly open permissions and never testing a restore.

Read the full NAS vs cloud storage guide here: Shared Drive Chaos? NAS vs Cloud Storage Explained

Published by Affix Center, a Mumbai-based IT services company that helps businesses plan and run cloud and infrastructure projects, including storage migration and backup.

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