Cut the risks of a globally distributed workforce

You’re walking into a building and see cobwebs lurking in the corners as an odd light reflects off the tiny white strands. The place looks familiar, and suddenly a face catches your attention—one that you recognize from a weekly Zoom meeting. It’s your coworker, someone who was also forced to work remotely for over 2 years.

What a strange time we’ve endured—but thankfully things are shifting back to more ordinary ways (fingers crossed). However, as normality peeks over the horizon, a new hiring strategy has appeared: global talent acquisition, which ignores geographic boundaries. As a result, teams are working together from every corner of the globe as a matter of course. This new dynamic has a downstream impact on the IT administrators who support these globally distributed teams—and IT is faced with a bigger risk than in years past.

It’s a given that companies need to have data at employees’ fingertips to ensure efficient operations and high-quality work. For those with a globally distributed workforce, that can mean the need to operate file servers in locations around the world. Unfortunately for the IT team, this approach can be extremely difficult to manage, because it spreads the challenges of data protection, governance, audit, compliance, and cost control.

These challenges don't have to be impossible, however, if you leverage the flexibility of the cloud with a new and different approach. You can now get rid of distributed file servers completely in favor of a consolidated storage footprint that provides a single point of control and access. You get streamlined (and way more cost-effective) data management, governance, audit, and compliance… all while keeping overall TCO as low as possible.

We wanted to make this journey as easy as possible for you, so we created NetApp^® Cloud Volumes Edge Cache. It’s software as a service that allows you to cut risk, protect performance, collaborate consistently, and reduce costs and effort.

Centralize distributed data into a single secure, scalable footprint that’s protected with unlimited backup to the cloud. Enjoy a single point of management that makes it easy to maintain governance, conduct audits, and remain compliant. And reduce management overhead while you’re at it.

The real-time performance of Cloud Volumes Edge Cache defies the “laws of latency.” To do this, a small-footprint software instance is installed in each location. You get local visibility into the cloud-resident file shares and local caching of often-used data—the edge instances. Each instance uses intelligent file caching to keep often-used data close to the users in that location and maintains a secure connection to central storage by using local encryption, compression, and file differencing to allow secure, seamless, high-speed access to centrally managed files. The result is fast access to important data with massively simplified data management for IT teams.​

NetApp Cloud Volumes Edge Cache increases the efficiency of designers, architects, engineers, and other highly compensated teams that collaborate on project files regularly. Cloud Volumes Edge Cache does this by maintaining a single version of truth in the cloud for all files while caching location-relevant data locally—and still maintaining centralized control. This approach significantly reduces latency, so the distributed workforce feels like it’s always working with a local file server. Cloud Volumes Edge Cache also uses real-time global file locking to ensure that no team member overwrites another employee's work. The resulting data coherency makes it seem as if everyone were in the same location working from the same file server.

The intelligent caching and global file locking of Cloud Volumes Edge Cache delivers a strong return on investment just by making collaborative projects go faster and preventing version-control problems.

Using Cloud Volumes Edge Cache makes your life as an IT professional simpler and saves your company money. It removes file servers from your budget and reduces the time spent on repetitive storage-related management tasks—freeing up time that you can spend on projects that matter.

NetApp has your back. Learn more about Cloud Volumes Edge Cache.