Running head: TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 1

To the Moon: Microsoft OneDrive for Business Cloud Platform

Jennie Larry Johnson

University of North Texas

Author Note

This document was prepared as a final term paper for the University of North Texas College of

Information LTEC 5460 course. TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 2

To the Moon: Microsoft OneDrive for Business Cloud Platform

What is OneDrive for Business Anyway?

OneDrive for business is Microsoft’s popular cloud platform that offers companies a virtual office online. Users can either upload documents created in traditional Microsoft Office desktop programs, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, to a OneDrive account, or create the materials within the OneDrive portal in real time. OneDrive also offers excellent tools for collaboration using desktop sharing which affords team members to work together on projects as though there are in cubicles side-by-side. OneDrive for Business is a part of

Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud. OneDrive can be accessed using any a personal computer with a

Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 operating system. OneDrive can also be accessed using a Microsoft Surface tablet, or Xbox One console.

History

LiveSide.net (n.d.) wrote OneDrive originated from Microsoft’s “Windows Live Folder”, the company’s first excursion into cloud computing. The original design was to offer users a simple process for backing up important legal documents, cherished photographs and other keepsakes using CD and/or DVD for safekeeping. Windows Live Folder was renamed Windows

Live SkyDrive shortly after the beta test in July 2006. Microsoft shorted the name to SkyDrive in May 2012. But, British Sky Broadcasting sued and won a fierce court battle against Microsoft over the SkyDrive name because of its similarity to British Sky Broadcasting’s moniker. After the battle, Microsoft changed the name from SkyDrive to OneDrive in May 2012 without noticeable modification to the logo. Microsoft also renamed SkyDrive Pro, their commercial version of SkyDrive, as OneDrive for Business at that time (“A Short History of the Many Lives of OneDrive”, n.d.) TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 3

Subscribers

The personal version of OneDrive with 25GB of at no cost to the user.

OneDrive for Business subscriptions, that include the entire Microsoft Office 365 cloud platform accessibility, programs and tools, range from $5 per month for 1TB of online storage and one

Office 365 Business Essentials to $35 per month the Office 365 Enterprise E5, a complete private platform of services including analytics and a private social network.

Benefits

The main benefit of OneDrive for Business is that it offers mobile productivity. People on the go can access files uploaded to, or created in, OneDrive at anytime from anywhere they can access the Internet.

How Does OneDrive Work?

OneDrive for Business using a SaaS (Software as a Service) cloud infrastructure. The

SaaS platform is so popular because it offers on-demand software over the Internet hosted and maintained by Office 365, the service provider. The benefits of SaaS is there is never need to upgrade, no chance of inconsistency of software versions across a broad network, and can be easily scaled to meet the needs of home-based offices as comprehensively as it can become global mega-corporations. Other service providers that have SaaS platforms are Google,

Salesforce.com, Amazon, and a host of other industry-specific organizations.

OneDrive, Office 365 and SharePoint

Microsoft considers OneDrive and Office 365 as a cloud-based solutions team. OneDrive allows users to create and store documents. Users can save documents in OneDrive libraries as quickly as they traditionally saved them in Windows Explorer. Users can create directories, subdirectories, folders and paths online in the OneDrive portal as soon as they always have. TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 4

What makes the difference? Office 365 now enables those users to then share the documents across the Internet. This increases the productivity and efficiency of collaborative team efforts.

Even better, these connections can be made synchronously in real-time including team document editing and conducting online team meetings with Skype, Microsoft cloud conferencing platform.

For those subscribers that also need B2B (Business-To-Business) cloud computing capabilities, OneDrive and Office 365 can also be comfortably housed on an on-premises

SharePoint Server or on the cloud-based SharePoint Online portal. This would enable two or more business partners to share a cloud-based file repository (Extranet) for more natural file sharing and collaboration. SharePoint would also allow partners to navigate between members- only sites (Microsoft, 2016) quickly.

SharePoint Consolidation and OneDrive Migration

OneDrive is seamlessly integrated into other Microsoft cloud products including Azure,

SharePoint Online, SharePoint Servicer 2013, and SharePoint Server 2016. In fact, Microsoft advises that OneDrive for Business is the SharePoint Servicer 2013. Because Microsoft appears always to seek opportunities to stay ahead of its competition, last year it announced that it was combing the on-premises SharePoint Server 2013 (OneDrive for Business) with its new

SharePoint Server 2016 for better management and control of its SaaS cloud. The move would not only enable subscribers to provide intranet access to documents within their Office 365 document libraries, after the migration, but subscribers would also be able to provide external internet files sharing as well.

Even better, in June 2017, Microsoft announced OneDrive for Business subscribers would be able to create a custom design their own cloud solutions by creating OneDrive TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 5

“hybrid” platforms. Microsoft (2017) made the hybrid creation process appear simple by outlining the five steps required for the customized solutions. These measures include:

1. Configuring Office 365 by registering a unique domain, configuring UPN suffixes

and synchronizing accounts;

2. Setting up the hybrid SharePoint for searchable user profiles, MySites and

Microsoft’s Application Management service;

3. Installing the SharePoint service 2013 Service Pack 1 to support OneDrive for

Business as a redirect option;

4. Redirecting OneDrive for Business to the SharePoint Central Administration

hybrid website; and

5. Testing the redirect connection between the hybrid OneDrive for Business and

Office 365 (Microsoft, 2017).

Microsoft also created sets of migration tools to help their subscribers prepare for and make the migrations to either their new SharePoint Service 2016 or OneDrive hybrid cloud.

But, What About Security?

As with all SaaS cloud configurations, there is always the question of: How safe is it to upload my company’s intellectual property to either of these cloud-based platforms. Microsoft advises the first can only be accessed by their owner/user account unless otherwise shared.

Visitors can also find addition OneDrive file security tips on Microsoft’s website including he steps they recommend taking to protect documents uploaded to their cloud servers. These tips include creating strong passwords, adding alternative email accounts, creating security questions and answers and using a two-step sign-in verification process. But, it should still be noted that

Microsoft advises OneDrive for Business users to always maintain a back-up copy of any TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 6 documents uploaded as well as a File History. Why would Microsoft include this small print?

Because the elephant in the room is that security is a big issue with cloud file storage. Headlines appear almost daily concerning the loss of sensitive corporate files and documents to hackers that have become more and more savvy and that appear to consider cloud services as their playground. There have been severe incidents of data theft, data loss, corrupted data, theft of sensitive technology, leaking of personal emails, and cloud security breaches. In fact, the U.S. and other countries globally have had to shut down major Internet-based piracy websites where hackers proudly shared their stolen goods including patented inventions, leaked movies and television shows, copyrighted materials, social security numbers, personal photos and just about anything else worth two cents to some less-than-honest loser obviously unable to create marketable works of their own. Microsoft wisely advises subscribers that the chance their

OneDrive server could be targeted is ever present and that care should be taken when the decision is made to make any SaaS cloud platform the only database file management system.

In Closing

As new and convenient as cloud computing can be, this writer knows personally the dangers of entrusting your files to cloud storage platforms. Hackers have been stealing her out of house and home (literally) by using a backdoor into her cloud servers for over seven years now. Therefore, she advises small business owners and entrepreneurs to store intellectual property on any SaaS platform with caution. After all, Bill Gates himself once said he did not feel he could have made Microsoft as successful as it has become if he had not been able to protect the company’s intellectual property and innovative designs. Considering these words are coming from the founder of cloud computing services, those words should not be taken lightly. TO THE MOON: MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS CLOUD PLATFORM 7

References

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