Is your current VPN method for remote file access disrupting your employees?
Do you have high latency between your various locations?
Do you need to share files remotely from the same file servers?
This story is about a franchise company with a corporate headquarters and franchise branches throughout North America. In such a distributed and dispersed business environment, employees are constantly on the move and need to access their applications and data outside of the headquarters.
Like most other businesses, this company uses a VPN for remote access, but encountered several problems. Lousy Internet or a weak Wi-Fi signal were among the issues users faced that made file access extremely difficult. High latency resulted in poor results and user experience, with response times ranging from 90 to 100 milliseconds.
The company also tried remote desktop solutions from Citrix and VMware for remote access, but setting up and maintaining a remote desktop system was very expensive. It required hardware, software, ongoing maintenance, upgrades, training and support.
Copying files from franchise offices to file servers at corporate headquarters became a nightmare. In addition, off-site file sharing required copying corporate data to cloud storage services such as Dropbox or ShareFile, resulting in Data Sprawl and higher costs. The company simply wanted to provide its field employees and franchisees with secure, mobile access to on-site file servers.
The first attempt to solve the problem is to move the company's file servers into Azure and AWS to create a hybrid cloud-local environment. The file servers "in the cloud" should provide good bandwidth and high availability for distributed teams at North America. However, some other VPN-related issues arise in the process.
After moving the company's file servers to the Azure or AWS cloud, do you switch to using the Azure/AWS side of the site-to-point VPN or do you continue to use the current VPN on the corporate firewall? In a hybrid environment, most organizations choose to continue using the existing VPN setup because remote workers are familiar with this way of working. In this type of setup, the path to the new file server for remote workers is to first tunnel into the corporate network and use the site-to-site VPN to reach the file servers in the cloud. The double hop contributes to the slowness of the VPN.
Since there are two VPNs now, the first VPN was on the corporate firewall before lift-and-shift. The second VPN is the site-to-point VPN that Azure and AWS offer. On a client device, employees can not use two VPNs at the same time. They must choose one or the other, but not both.
Let us say remote workers are still using the old VPN to tunnel into the corporate network before accessing file servers in the Azure or AWS data center via a site-to-site VPN. In this case, the corporate network becomes the single point of failure. Because it is typically located in an office building, remote workers cannot access the file servers if there are power or Internet disruptions.
Let us say you have already moved your file servers to Azure or AWS. In this case, you can use a web-based file access solution to turn your file servers into a SharePoint-like service and provide direct file server access without a double-hopping VPN.
Triofox provides secure mobile access and file sharing, disaster recovery, and on-premises file server recovery with easy cloud migration to file servers in the Cloud. It's the true cloud file server solution you have been looking for!
Triofox connects file servers and cloud storage for secure remote access without VPN.
Accessing files and folders directly from a web browser is as interactive as from a desktop drive.
Triofox leverages cloud storage for secure mobile file sharing via a web browser or mobile app.
Employees can share files and folders with external business partners with permission controls, expiration dates, and web links.
The solution provides remote access to file servers via web protocols without the need for a VPN. The Access Agent is always on and always provides a drive letter for remote access. There are also web browser-based file manager capabilities and mobile apps.
The solution provides web browser-based file sharing capabilities. Sharing files and folders is as simple as right-clicking on a file or folder and sharing it as a web link. The receiving party can view or download the shared items. Collaborators can also use the same Web Link features to receive and upload files.
Device backup is one of the solution's many data protection features. More and more employees are working from home using devices provided by the company. They may not permanently store documents on a company-provided drive letter. Instead, they may store them in the local Documents folder. Device backup can protect these files that reside on a remote device.
Define different permissions for folders at different levels of the directory structure or apply NTFS permissions directly.
Web-based secure data room allows access to shared folders for viewing only, with download disabled.
You can set user rights to share folders from internal Active Directory users to external customers and partners.
Shared folders are subject to version control, and notifications are available for users who have subscribed to the folders.
Triofox integrates with Office 365 to enable web-based collaborative editing and co-authoring of files within the shared folder.
Use Outlook integration to share large folders or files as web links via email.
Convert shared files and folders into web links for direct access via web browsers.
Access shared files and folders from mobile devices, such as an iPhone or Android phone.
Data stays on the company's file servers. Existing permissions govern remote and mobile access. Editing and modification of files is permanently stored in the original file location.
Combines NTFS permissions, Active Directory users and drive mappings with mobile access from any device.
Adopts file server compliance and enables administrators to perform HIPAA or GDPR compliance audits and generate reports demonstrating compliance with mobile file access and collaboration.
Organizations can address privacy concerns by using Triofox to access internal file servers. There is often discussion of replacing existing file servers with cloud solutions to reduce costs and management overhead, and Triofox can facilitate this in any private cloud. However, Triofox offers the unique ability to use existing file servers as a replacement for sharing files in the cloud!
Simplify remote access to file shares with familiar interfaces on any computer or device. Windows and Mac desktops display natively mapped drives in Explorer and Finder. That same experience persists on iOS and Android devices like iPads, iPhones, and Pixels or popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer.
Provide an always-on mapped drive that works anywhere on any device and allows mobile users to access internal file shares or cloud file servers easily. Windows file server network shares and shared drive can be turned into online shared folders guarded by the same security measures as those from on-premise file servers and governed by the same Active Directory.
Files are secured at rest and in transit with military-grade encryption, secure connections, and more. Automatically use existing users and permissions to save setup time and money. When files and folders can stay in place with the Windows file servers, the security parameters are smaller and simpler than a public online sharing service and easier to pass compliance tests.
Easily collaborate with business partners by providing them with access to a limited set of internal files or folders. Share files with non-AD users while maintaining administrative controls. Simplify multi-site collaboration with automatic version controls and file locking. Mobile workers will see the same content in the online shared folder as if they were from an internal mapped drive.
Mapped drives display directory structure but delay downloads until a file is active to reduce bandwidth usage and endpoint storage consumption. Shared folders and files also have generated web links, showing them in a web browser-based file manager. The files will not be actively downloaded or viewed (as in secure-data-room) until users generate access intents.
Eliminate the overhead and support tickets commonly associated with VPN file sharing, Always On VPN, or Direct Access. Automatically use existing users and permissions to save setup time and money. Internal shared drive, with the Triofox server's help, has new online folder representations over HTTPS (SSL) protocols and RESTful APIs for client agents and mobile applications.
Triofox provides a white-labeled platform that makes it easy for businesses to build a private online file sharing solution based on Amazon, Windows Azure, or Google Cloud infrastructure. MSPs can even create the white-labeled solution inside their most preferred data center on a per-client basis with per-client branding support.
Centrally manage users, access controls, and storage for each tenant. Easily keep track of where the data is, who has access and how sharing happens. A centralized web-based management portal provides a single-pane-of-glass-style management console to manage shared folders and shared files, and other objects in the management scope.
Triofox has the flexibility to provide an on-premises alternative to Dropbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint using existing file servers. You can modernize your file server so much that it is the same as those from public domains from the online file sharing solution's perspective. At the same time, the solution keeps all the file server security and data ownership benefits.
For complete control and visibility, administrators define permissions from the file server that was their source or natively with Triofox. Businesses and their employees accumulate the NTFS permission structure over years of active use and practice. Those NTFS permissions will be inherited by Triofox and continue to control access to online folder sharing.
Adopts file server compliance and enables administrators to perform HIPAA or GDPR compliance audits and generate reports demonstrating mobile file access and collaboration compliance.
