Season 1 Episode 29: Is This the Best Cloud Storage Platform for Your Small Business?
This is a transcript that has been modified from its original version.
What we’re covering this week:
In Tech News, we’re talking about how Facebook recently admitted that they knew more about Cambridge Analytica than they may have initially let on. Then we’re diving into Tech Tips, which will help you decide which cloud storage platform for your small business will be the best choice. There are free options and paid options, and we’re going through them all to figure out which one would work best (and Tim is sharing his favorite one!)
Let’s get started!
Tech News of the Week: Did Facebook Know About Cambridge Analytica?
Something that happened recently in the world of technology that relates to you and your business.
It has come out recently that Facebook actually did have an idea what Cambridge Analytica was doing before everything blew up.
Cambridge Analytica is an ad house in theory, but what they really are as a data mining company. They are extremely good at mining data from social media sites, and primarily, they’ll sell that data to anyone who could make use of it. A large part of that is corporations and brands.
But their big play is under the political sign, especially every four years, including every two years during the midterm elections.
They’re able to sell and mine this data and help political parties with their ads on social media.
As you might imagine, this is a tricky situation at times. And a lot of stuff blew up in December of 2015, after Trump’s election, since they had been working with the Trump campaign.
The allegations are that they had essentially been moving the needle more towards Trump than anything else. Some people say that, because of Cambridge Analytica, Trump won.
But the fact is that recently some emails from Facebook have come out where they were saying in the emails: we’re a little bit suspicious about Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook noticed Cambridge Analytica was getting a pretty deep into the data, and they weren’t sure where they were going with that data. While Facebook was under oath, however, they said the opposite: that they had no idea that Cambridge Analytica was reaching as deep into the data that they could mine from Facebook.
But the thing is, Cambridge Analytica couldn’t mine even a sentence from Facebook without Facebook giving them the explicit rights to do so.
Things like this really go hand in hand with something we say often around the Team Nerd Tech Show: this was a feature, not a bug.
Because really, this is what Facebook does. We lie to ourselves to tell ourselves that it doesn’t do that, because we liked the service so much. We’re just willing to put up with it.
But don’t forget that the entire reason for Facebook’s existence is to, in a very nontransparent way, take as much information about you as they can and sell it to anyone who will pay them for it.
Facebook gets hit by the EU with a $5 billion fine for their lack of privacy protections for their users. And Facebook’s share price goes up immediately because that’s literally pocket change. That’s a rounding error for these people, for how much money they’ve got. And it could have been so much worse.
In the case of Facebook, their assets, even with these large data centers that they have, which are quite expensive to operate, but even with that, their asset base is fractional compared to a Ford Motor Company or a GM or an Exxon.
So if you are something like Cambridge Analytica, and you’re talking to the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or a particular candidate, you might say, Listen, we’re going to find out. We can find out all sorts of things for you. If you want to pay us to do it and Facebook will let us. And Facebook pretends like, again, these emails that have “leaked out”, or they say.
This goes back to episode when we talked about the Face App, that one of the main ways Cambridge Analytica got so much data from users on Facebook via a personality quiz. People were willingly sharing their personal data with Cambridge Analytica, in exchange for so much precious data about themselves. Which they then shared with their friends in a new post. And it just grows.
Keep it in mind, though, that when it comes to Facebook? Data mining like that is a feature of the program. It’s not a bug. Its the reason for their entire existence.
The issue is with the transparency more than any other issue with Facebook. If someone walked up to your front door and they said, “We’ll pay your cable bill if you allow us to read every text you send, every email you write or receive, and see wherever you go online. Then we’ll sell that for a bigger profit than your cable bill. But… you’ll have free cable!”
We just really hope this isn’t something anyone would do. But if you do, know that when you go into it your eyes are wide open.
Remember, when it comes to the internet: if the product is free, then you’re the product.
There is another piece of news about Facebook these days we wanted to get into, and that is that they have recently said they will allow users to have more control over what information about themselves gets shared online.
Most of us at this point have years and years of data used through Facebook that they have on us. Before now, that data pretty much lives in perpetuity. Basically, anyone can come in and pay for ads that use your data. Facebook would just give it up in their Insights, available to anyone.
Now, however, they are giving users the option to erase all of that data and start fresh, and have more control over what is shared. And they’re also being more transparent about sharing ways you can understand what you see in your feed and why you are seeing it.
We don’t believe that Facebook will be getting rid of all this extra data they are not allowing advertisers to see. They will likely sequester it someplace instead.
What should just be our standard, which Europe’s got very close to, is GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation. This means that no one is allowed your information that you haven’t specifically opted in to. And they make that permission very easy to say yes or no to, as opposed to Facebook, which hides a lot of its permissions under layers of menus.
Facebook has done that on purpose. Again, like we always say: it’s a feature, not a bug.
Tim quote: Our privacy should be something that we give away when we decide to give it away, not because we’re hoodwinked into it through a free service.
This is what makes it tough, of course, is that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Google are genuinely very valuable services to a lot of us.
They connect. They make you connect to people on a human level, which is why it’s so difficult for people to quit Facebook. There’s that human element to it.
That was once their slogan, even: Facebook connects you with those you know. It fills a base need for people to connect.
That’s the thing: as platforms, they genuinely are valuable. They’re valuable at the business level, and they’re certainly valuable at the person to person level. If you’ve ever been part of putting together a class reunion, there’s nothing quite like Facebook for finding people.
But the stuff they do with this data is not always on the right side. Cambridge Analytica was a great example of it how it’s not always good.
And it should be good.
Tech Tip of the Week: Finding the Right Cloud Storage Platform for Your Small Business
Something a small business can use in their business right away.
This week, our Tech Tip is all about finding the right cloud storage platform for your small business.
The right cloud storage platform for your business can be a godsend.
We chatted about this before recording, and we drilled it down to four apps we really use and recommend.
Here’s what we look for in a good cloud storage platform for a small business: The ability to store the files you have in the cloud only, or to ability to download them back down to a different hard drive for access that way.
A good cloud storage platform for small business is valuable, but not only that, it’s an extremely productive way to share files.
- Number Four on our list is Dropbox.
- It’s a really simple interface. That’s the best thing about it.
- The free version is not the most secure, and you only get two gigabytes.
- It’s a pretty good product for a small business.
- It hosts a great interface for File Sync and Share. This means you can have files on your phone or on your laptop or desktop, and they can be in a folder, but they can be sent up to the cloud.
Dropbox for businesses is quite good.
It costs more money.
It has a five-user minimum, but you can store a lot up there.
It’s not so good for sharing data off of an internal file server although that’s true for most cloud storage platforms.
- Number 3 on our list is Google Drive.
It’s similar to Dropbox in many ways, except that it’s a Google product and not a startup like Dropbox.
- Number 2 on our list is OneDrive from Microsoft.
This uses what’s called SharePoint in the background. Like Dropbox, it’s a really good way for companies to be able to sync some data out in the cloud without having a full on the server for that.
Not so great at syncing, there are often some hiccups with that.
If you have a server inside your business, you really can’t share it from the server into one drive. You can copy it over there or you can move it over there, but you will have trouble keeping it synced.
This is a typical drawback for many cloud storage platforms for small businesses, really.
The way they are designed is to keep everything you have in OneDrive, or Google Drive, and instead of being able to sync it back and forth between a different hard drive when you need to.
Why would you choose Google Drive over Microsoft?
This comes down to which ecosystem you’re more confortable in, really.
If your shop uses G suite, which is the Google suite of apps, you might use Gmail for your company even if it’s with mycompanyname.com and Google is hosting. If you’re using Google Docs and Sheets, it makes even more sense.
It depends on how you buy GSuite, and that will affect the amount of data you can have in them.
Likewise, if the ecosystem at your company is using Office365 for email and then for office apps like Word, Excel, then OneDrive would tend to make more sense.
Tim quote: You’re going to find generally, especially in a smaller company, mixing and matching those flavors can get kind of clunky, so you’re going to pick one side of the other that you’re primarily going to use.
In most cases, we recommend just picking a flavor and going with it instead of trying different apps and platforms.
When you’re trying to decide which cloud storage platform your small business should use, think about what you’re trying to accomplish when you use one.
If you’re a smaller organization or even a mid-size organization with about 15-18 computer users, you might not have an internal file server cause you don’t need one.
In that instance, it’s good to use something like Google Drive or OneDrive for most of their file storage for all of their users. It works very well for that as long as it’s set up properly.
1. This brings us to our Number 1 Cloud Storage Platform, and that’s ShareSync.
- We like ShareSynce because it can sync files off of a file server.
- This is extremely helpful for places like accounting firms or similar, because they have a large amount of client information stored in the cloud.
- That information needs to get synced back to an internal server. ShareSync does this really well, and Google Drive and OneDrive don’t as much.
You can also set it up to automatically sync files from the internal server up to the cloud, so there’s less manual moving around. You can set it up so that, say, all the files in this part of Quickbooks need to go directly into the file server when they are uploaded, and it’ll do that without you needing to take care of it manually. That can be really helpful for a lot of small businesses that are looking for automation.
This type of syncing also works with ShareSync even when you don’t have an internet connection. Staff can be away from the office, make updates to the files while they’re gone, go back to the office -or log onto a different secure internet connection – and then those files will sync back up to the server quietly in the background. It’s a much more, much safer way than manually adding or moving things around.
One thing we will also say is how helpful it is to have the business application set up for any of these platforms. Say you’re using DropBox in an airport, and your computer gets stolen. One call to Dropbox, when you’re a business customer, means they can pull the information off so it can’t be accessed by the thief. That’s a very valuable addition to these clout storage platforms for a small business.
Business customers will also have access to more data storage space. Google Drive comes with about 5gigs of data which isn’t much, especially when you’re running a company.
It comes down to this: You have to be able to control your data, you have to have control of your data, and the free cloud storage platforms just don’t do enough for small businesses. It’s worth it to expand and find the right platform for you, and then be willing to pay for it.
Links used in this episode:
Facebook was investigating Cambridge Analytica three months before it originally claimed
Facebook releases internal emails discussing Cambridge Analytica in 2015
Facebook to let users disconnect accounts from browsing history
Facebook has a new privacy tool to protect your data — here’s how to use it now
Timestamps:
1:23 Tech News: Facebook knew more about Cambridge Analytica than they let on
10:29 Facebook will let users control more of their own data
18:24 Tech Tip: Our favorite cloud storage platforms for small business
18:52 Pros and cons of DropBox
20:35 Pros and cons of Google Drive
20:50 OneDrive from Microsoft365
21:38 Drawbacks of using cloud storage apps
21:58 How to decide which cloud storage is right for your small business
24:49 Pros and Cons of ShareSync, the cloud storage platform we recommend