Top 5 Ways to Optimize Remote Work Through NAS
By Tim Li, technical writer, Buffalo Americas
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 25, 2022 at 2:00 pmIn recent years, many businesses have moved to a partial or full remote working environment, with employees taking on remote jobs or telework jobs. This has resulted in displaced IT infrastructure and operations, such as a large number of personal devices being leveraged as work devices, and changing the employment landscape. Works from home companies are facing their own challenges, such as remote access security issues and endpoint device management.
With NAS, you will have more flexibility to optimize your storage while maintaining robust data security and industry compliance. Buffalo Americas, Inc. NAS allows for remote access over the internet, are simple to set up, and offers cloud integration and iSCSI support capabilities. These features enable more secure and stable connections, and offer the flexibility to scale for future growth, so you can smoothly transition to remote work without losing productivity.
5 – Streamline Storage Environment
With higher capacity and the ability to integrate cloud storage, a single NAS can realize the functionality of multiple office servers at the same time. Using a NAS as a centralized storage repository also allows you to access and back up your data from anywhere, allowing your remote team members to be able to store, share, or back up their data with little hassle. You can configure port trunking on the NAS to further increase bandwidth for smooth connections from multiple clients.
Businesses moving more team members remote will often seek smaller offices, limiting physical space for hardware. A NAS device is usually much smaller than a typical file server or computer, but offers large capacities to hold your data. And if you need more capacity down the line, you will have plenty of options available, from integrating cloud services to use iSCSI to optimize and expand your storage.
4 – Increased Data Availability and Security
With employees not in a secure business environment, they are vulnerable to cyberthreats, and data leak threats are at an all-time high. Team members on disparate devices in disparate locations make it difficult to consistently back up data on a schedule, and data loss prevention is no less important. Threat actors are well aware that remote work from home jobs lacks the data security protocol options of an office setting. Endpoint data protection may be weak for mobile devices, and the privacy of data can be compromised.
With a NAS, you can enable automatic backups for all remote team members’ devices. You can also backup to and from the cloud, as well as synchronize data from various locations, so you don’t have to worry about data availability. You can also take advantage of virtualization to create a BDR plan, so if a data loss or data breach event occurs, you can recover virtual machines on any spare hardware to prevent downtime. This is important if you have minimal staff at your office location, as you will need to be able to recover your data or restore an existing server so that productivity does not suffer for remote team members.
With a Buffalo NAS, team members will be able to access LAN resources from remote devices such as laptops and mobile devices with online security and privacy, such as through a VPN. The NAS also provides access encryption with SSL, and you can also configure the NAS ports to prevent unauthorized access from unidentified IP addresses to further ensure safety.
3 – Reap the Benefits of Hybrid Cloud
Buffalo NAS can integrate existing cloud services you already use. Integrating common cloud services such as Dropbox and Amazon S3 can make your data and applications accessible from anywhere in the world by your team. They will be able to store, share, and collaborate on files with ease, increasing productivity. A hybrid cloud approach gives you the flexibility of distributing your data requirements to the public cloud, private cloud, or local resources as needed so you can maximize efficiency. If workloads get intensive between remote team members, or if you are expecting a large file to be sent or uploaded, you can adjust cloud storage space as needed without overloading your office network.
No matter how secure the public cloud service is, the fact remains that your data is under management by another provider, with security protocols removed from your control. In other words, your data is only as secure as the third-party provider makes it to be. When you move to a hybrid cloud model, you can set up how data is stored and backed up so the most critical data can be moved to a secure onsite (or offsite) server, ensuring that your critical files are protected.
2 – Simplicity and Flexibility for Lower Costs
With Buffalo NAS, remote management and cloud integration capabilities mean less legwork for business tasks, and much lower costs. With virtualization, you can also create multiple virtual servers from a single physical server, and consolidate scores of physical systems into only a few physical servers. This saves you hardware costs as your storage spaces both virtual and physical are optimized. On top of that, Buffalo offers the remote management service platform that provides the ability for users to manage multiple NAS devices from the same console to save effort on onsite visits.
Should you need to expand, iSCSI allows you to integrate additional storage without needing to reconfigure your entire environment. iSCSI support leverages your network infrastructure investments by using standard Ethernet equipment and no specialized IT staff. Depending on your needs, you can bypass cloud storage altogether using NAS devices, saving you on costly monthly subscription costs and possibly hidden fees associated with cloud storage.
1 – Boost Productivity
NAS devices offer flexibility in how you want to structure your storage infrastructure, and you can take advantage of this to increase productivity as you continue to transition to remote work.
Along the lines of flexibility is the speed. Typically, remote team members accessing a NAS via a browser presents a smaller data overhead than more sophisticated remote tools and applications to ensure a smooth connection and faster transfer speeds throughout working hours. You can also set up file access permissions on the NAS so only those with proper authorization can access certain files and folders, enabling a streamlined collaboration with other team members.
Cloud service integration means you can further provide low latency for better real-time collaboration experiences. With virtualization, users can connect to a specific virtual machine as needed from any location can make the remote work experience far smoother. The NAS also provides a means to always have data backups ready without affecting daily productivity.
Storage and Backup Solutions for Remote Work Environments
Every business, regardless of size, needs fast and reliable data access to promote safe and smooth remote work. Buffalo NAS simplifies storage administration and backup, and consolidates storage efficiency and cloud capability to boost the effectiveness of remote work. It is purpose-built for productivity and security, and provides a more secure and stable storage environment so your remote team members can work with home office security and peace of mind.