How to Enable Remote Employees to Securely Access On-premises Company Data in Under 1 Hour

Interest in letting employees to work from home has never been higher and will remain high even after the Covid-19 virus has run its course.  For Companies large and small  the key challenge is how to make Company data available remotely in a way that is easy for employees to use without compromising on information security.  The Enterprise File Fabric™ offers an unmatched set of features to support secure remote working.  In this post we’ll see how to set up the File Fabric in less than an hour to provide secure remote access to on-premises data, be that SMB, NAS / SAN or Microsoft DFS shares.  The best part is that data is not copied or removed anywhere, it remains in the same secure place and the File Fabric provides web scale secure access  to it .

Continue reading “How to Enable Remote Employees to Securely Access On-premises Company Data in Under 1 Hour”

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How to securely and productively enable employees to work from home using existing company data with the File Fabric

Remote Working CoronavirusOne of the things the Coronavirus Covid-19 has brought sharply into focus is the topic of employee remote working.  Whether this is to limit the spread of the virus or because employees are self isolating, many companies may find themselves in a position where a significant part of their workforce is working out of the office.

The aim of this post is to outline how the File Fabric software may help companies who wish to prepare or facilitate remote working.

Firstly some background on the File Fabric.  The File Fabric is a secure multi-cloud content management data collaboration solution. It does not provide any storage rather it indexes and works with existing on-premise or on-cloud storage silos. It unites files in these disparate storage platforms to provide a single cohesive way for people to securely work and collaborate.

The File Fabric has a strong ethos and governance and compliance of the data that it indexes and makes available providing event based audit and configurable compliance policies.

There are three ways to use the File Fabric today:

1.  For small businesses from our SaaS hosted platform. This version of the File Fabric does not have all of the features of the enterprise version.

2.  Enterprise Version that is self hosted by a company and can be deployable on-premises or on-cloud.

3.  For free using our self hosted personal version.

Let’s take a looks at some of the challenges and solutions that may be faced by remote workers and how the File Fabric solves them.

Continue reading “How to securely and productively enable employees to work from home using existing company data with the File Fabric”

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Replacing the Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) to securely access on-premises DFS or SMB File Shares

Providing remote users with access to on-premises file systems, such as Microsoft DFS or Windows CIFS / SMB shares,  can be a hard task, especially as multiple security layers often exist, like firewalls and VPNs.

Some companies have opted to solve this challenge by deploying the Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) as a bridge to provide users who are remote with access to these on premise systems. The UAG was a software solution, facilitating access to file shares, intranets and corporate systems.

The Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway is now officially deprecated.

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Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 2

In part 1, we set up the SME appliance with a Microsoft DFS Storage Provider. Today we will continue the setup, enabling AD user authentication, corporate shares, department shares, and home directories for each user.

Prerequisites

This article assumes you followed along in Part 1 and met the prerequisites there, in addition you’ll need a few more shares configured on your fileserver, and a few users and groups configured in Active Directory.

Continue reading “Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 2”

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Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 1

Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browserThis blog post will highlight how a company can leverage their existing Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) infrastructure as a part of their cloud strategy. Companies will be able to treat DFS shares as cloud storage and automatically create cloud DFS shares for users based on their DFS home directory.

Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) is a technology that allows multiple servers to host a single file share, providing fault tolerance and performance enhancement for multi-site Active Directory topologies.

Microsoft introduced DFS as an add-on to Windows NT 4.0, and DFS has been included in all versions of Windows since Windows 2000. DFS consists of a server component, included in all versions of Windows Server, and a client component, included in all versions of Windows. It works with the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (sometimes referred to as Windows networking). The SMB protocol is also more commonly known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS). Continue reading “Access Microsoft Distributed File System Shares (DFS) from a web browser using the Enterprise File Fabric – Part 1”

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