Why Should You Look Into Google Drive Alternatives?

12 January 2023

Google Drive has skyrocketed in popularity since its release over a decade ago, and the numbers prove it. Recent research indicates that its databases hold an enormous two trillion files across 190 countries. This is an impressive achievement for a platform allowing users to store and access files from any device with an internet connection. Google Drive is an incredibly convenient service for personal and professional use.

However, with the rise of cloud-based computing, businesses and organizations are increasingly turning towards Google Drive alternatives to better store and manage their data.

These solutions provide superior security measures and offer a wide range of features, such as file sharing, collaboration tools, real-time editing, and more, that cater to any team’s needs.

Top Alternatives to Google Drive

Here are some top Google Drive alternatives:

Sync.com

Sync.com is a Canadian cloud storage solution that offers up to 5GB of free storage with the primary account and more for an additional fee. It also has vigorous security features, such as zero-knowledge encryption and two-factor authentication.

In addition, it allows syncing between connected devices and provides collaboration features like file sharing, versioning, and commenting. It also offers third-party integrations with a variety of applications.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage service developed by Dropbox, Inc. that provides users with a simple way to store and share files. It offers 2GB of free storage with the primary account, and more can be purchased for an additional fee. It also has robust collaboration features and allows syncing between connected devices.

For those who want more than just file storage, Dropbox also offers document scanning, calendar sharing, photo galleries, password management, remote wipe capabilities, and third-party integrations.

iCloud Drive

iCloud Drive is Apple’s cloud-based file hosting platform that lets users securely store documents in the cloud. It is preinstalled on iOS devices like iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers so that users can access their files from any device.

It also has a decent level of security and is compliant with GDPR, PPED, HIPAA, and SOC 2 standards.

Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution that comes preinstalled on Windows and Xbox consoles. It offers 5GB of free storage with the primary account and more available for an additional fee.

It also enables syncing between connected devices and supports collaboration features like file sharing, versioning, co-authoring documents in real-time, and rich media integration. In addition, it also includes advanced security features, such as encryption at rest, data loss prevention (DLP), malware scanning and detection, and two-factor authentication.

Why Should You Look at Google Drive Alternatives?

Here are some advantages of using different online storage solutions compared to Google Drive for efficient management of business documents.

Better Security

Google Drive is a popular file storage service, but its security measures may be lacking compared to other alternatives. Consumers seek data storage services prioritizing privacy and security, and many are turning to competitors to ensure their sensitive information stays safe.

For example, OneDrive is an invaluable tool for people who need quick access to their data at any place or time. This cloud platform allows users to start editing an MS Office document on one device and view it from another device, like a mobile phone or tablet on the go.

Offline Availability

Google Drive’s offline access and ability to edit documents without the internet are beneficial features. However, users can encounter difficulties when their connections are reliable or entirely available for an extended period.

Alternatively, Sync is a cloud storage service that stands out in the industry. It features full-time access and secure protection of a company’s files, with dedicated encryption key security, automatic backups, and version tracking for files once they have been uploaded.

Its ability to allow users to access offline storage from any device provides an additional layer of convenience when using its cloud service. It allows users to keep their data safe even if their online access gets interrupted or unavailable, giving them the added confidence of knowing that their data will remain secure and easily accessible.

Privacy

While Google Drive is a convenient way to store, share, and collaborate on files with others, there is an important security consideration when deciding to use the cloud service. It is widely believed that Google can browse data in the cloud. At the same time, the company assures that it cannot open or read this data. Therefore, many users are only willing to put sensitive documents in their Cloud storage if they have robust privacy policies.

Alternatively, Sync provides a secure way to store and access files, utilizing its zero-knowledge security feature. Even its free 5GB account offers superior protection, and thus, it makes sense why many cloud storage users highly recommend Sync.

Wrapping Up

Google Drive is an excellent tool for saving and sharing documents with colleagues, but other alternatives offer better security and privacy protection. Deciding which cloud storage solution to use requires a detailed analysis of each service’s features and benefits to determine which one best suits the needs of a business or organization.

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World’s biggest chip will help train AI.

The tech world heard one of its biggest announcements, courtesy of Cerebral Systems. The Los Altos based tech manufacturer announced that created the world’s most powerful processor. In terms of comparisons, the Cerebras’s new processor is faster, stronger and bigger than anyone of its competitors, including Nvidia. Even though this was big news, the company did not stop there. Known for its hardware capabilities in Artificial Intelligence, it announced the creation of a specialized server for the chip, which would be solely directed at enabling, improving and building different AI capabilities and applications. The new chip from Cerebral has been titled as the ‘Wafer Scale Engine’. Just to give you a quick glimpse of its might and processing prowess, the company claims that in terms of mere comparisons, the WSE is nearly fifty-seven times mightier than Nvidia’s biggest offering. This means that the world has never seen a General Processing Unit (GPU) on the scale of the WSE. As the chip is expected to power strong AI-based applications, it boasts of 3000x on-chip memory capabilities. The new chip is expected to churn terabytes of data with ease. Its main application will be in cloud servers and large-scale SaaS businesses. Cerebral CEO, Andrew Feldman told Data Center Knowledge that the major applications of the new WSE chip will enable tech businesses to take their AI capabilities to the next level. The Founder of former chip company Sea Micro (Feldman sold the same to AMD for a record $334 Million in 2012) told the journal that this is the most revolutionary chip that has come out from any of the major manufacturers in recent times. Does size matter? Semiconductor companies of the world have spent decades developing ever tinier chips. These can be combined to create super-powerful processors, thus why create a standalone AI mega-chip? According to Cerebral, the answer is that hooking lots of small chips together creates delays that slow down training of AI models causing a vast industry bottleneck. The company’s chip binds 400,000 cores or parts that operate processing which is tightly linked to one another to speed up data-crunching. It can also transfer data between memory and processing extremely fast. Fault tolerance: But if this incredible chip is going to overcome the AI world, it will have to show that it can overcome some significant hurdles. One of these is in manufacturing. If contaminants sneak into a wafer being used to assemble lots of tiny chips, few of these may not be affected by impurity; but if there’s just one mega-chip on a cracker, the entire thing may have to be damaged severely. Cerebral alleges it’s found innovative ways to assure that contaminants won’t endanger a whole chip, but we don’t yet know if these will work in quantity production. Power play: Another difficulty is energy performance. AI chips are spectacularly power-hungry, which has both economic and environmental assumptions. Shifting data between lots of tiny AI chips is a massive power suck, so Cerebras should have an asset here. If it can help solve this energy challenge, then the startup’s chip could determine that for AI, big silicon is pretty. Cerebral has done its homework when it comes to the WSE. Before making the announcement, the company has already started working with some companies with regard to the chip’s AI capabilities. CEO Feldman was proud of the fact that the next-gen chip would be particularly helpful in enabling researchers in several fields including those studying neural networks to make the most of this next-gen technology. In other words, the impact of this chip for the next levels of human advancements would be huge, to say the least. The principal analyst of Tritias Research, Kevin Krewell stated that these are interesting and exciting times for the industry. With Cerebral pushing the boundaries of what is possible in chip development and advancement. Several technologies and studies, which were limited and curtailed till now, would be able to power through with the help of WSE chips.www.wordcounttool.com Read Also: How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Banking And Financial Institutions? New Technologies And Consumer Protection 6 Software Technologies That Will Dominate 2018

5 Core Pillars Of Cloud FinOps

The current dynamic business environment requires companies to take a structured, proactive approach to manage, monitoring and predicting their cloud service costs. Doing so will help them to meet their financial goals. Cloud FinOps is a cultural shift and operational framework that brings finance, business, and technology together to accelerate business value realization and drive financial accountability through the cloud. At its heart, cloud FinOps enables businesses to understand the challenges and complexities of cloud information technology (IT) financial management. The core purpose of cloud FinOps is to optimize the business value generated from cloud services. It involves various techniques, like free credits, least-priced services, negotiating costs, and more. 5 Core Pillars of Cloud FinOps You need to know the core principles of the cloud FinOps design to successfully implement it. These design principles help build a cost-conscious, self-governing culture while fostering business agility and financial accountability in the cloud. The following are some key pillars of Cloud FinOps: 1. Enablement and Accountability This principle focuses on creating lean or centralized cross-functional teams. These teams may include application owners, architecture, operations, finance, and engineering. Establishing these teams enhances governance and sets guidelines for managing cloud expenditure. 2. Cost Optimization This principle requires stakeholders to identify the main cost-optimization drivers in the cloud environment. It is a continuous, iterative process that offers a consistent solution to managing cloud usage most cost-effectively. The following are the three common optimization areas: Architecture Pricing Resource 3. Realization and Measurement This principle involves creating core key performance indicators (KPIs), and business-value metrics will be utilized to evaluate the success of the transformation. In most cases, customers begin with a series of cost-optimization metrics. Afterward, business value or unit economics measurements, like cost per customer served or transaction. 4. Forecasting and Planning Proper cloud estimates and planning require the company to fully understand its cost drivers, assign cloud expenditure, and benchmark efficiency. Doing so ensures minimal deviations between the actual and forecasted costs. 5. Accelerators and Tools As you would expect, cloud FinOps requires you to employ proper accelerators and relevant tools. Doing so ensures effective monitoring and management of cloud spending. These tools may include: Automation scripts that set budget alerts and account guardrails Reporting dashboard for tracking value and managing cloud spend Cost management tools for analyzing real-time cost and billing data. How Do Cloud FinOps Work? This operational framework involves a three-step lifecycle to ensure teams remain focused on and organized to deliver business value and attain financial accountability. These steps include: Informing Optimizing Operation 1. Informing This stage involves informing the company about all cloud-related costs. It happens by providing 100% visibility and assigning cloud costs to relevant business units. Here, the goal is to let every team understand their cloud spending. Also, it involves benchmarking against the company’s internal objectives, like budgets and forecasts. Companies can visualize areas they’re attaining business value and where they do not, helping them determine their progress. 2. Optimizing Once members know the organization’s goals, costs, and achieved business value, they proceed to optimize costs. This step involves providing recommendations and actionable insights to the different teams. Here, companies cut off unnecessary services that increase their cloud spending. Also, they automate rightsizing of different resources and maximize the utilization of the available resources. As a result, it significantly reduces cloud expenditure. 3. Operation Once all costs are optimized, it’s time to architect the cloud environment to achieve and maintain minimal cloud spending. The company creates governance policies that help attain technological, business, and financial goals. The primary objective here is to achieve measurable goals and continual improvement. 4 Benefits Of Cloud FinOps: Adopting cloud FinOps best processes and practices helps enterprises achieve various high-level benefits, such as: 1. Cost Efficiency Cloud FinOps enable you to attain cost efficiency thanks to advanced tools and accelerators. These tools help you identify areas of optimization, track and optimize cloud spending, and hold every team responsible, reducing unnecessary cloud costs. 2. Positive Cultural Shift By holding every cloud consumer responsible and making their data on cloud usage and spending available, cloud FinOps helps optimize cloud consumption. As a result, it helps create a beneficial culture for all cloud-consuming parties. 3. Reduces Uninformed Decisions Uninformed decisions can be extremely costly. Without proper tracking of cloud spending and resources, your company may be spending significant resources on the cloud. Fortunately, cloud FinOps products provide real-time granular reports and insights, helping leaders to: Get service-level cloud utilization Track underutilized or idle resources Compare the business cloud resource usage by time Figure out business areas that need more resources. With such data, leaders are aware of which areas need what resources. Also, they are informed about their decisions’ financial implications. 4. Unifies the Company’s Ecosystem Every company often has a frustrating, complex, and invisible culture split between finance, IT, and DevOps teams. Requests, approvals, and processes vary from department to department, though they aim to achieve a common goal. Also, technical terms and jargon may not be understood by other teams. What’s more, the finance team often loses control of cloud infrastructure procurement when the cloud engineering team steps into the process. How does Cloud FinOps help in this case? Well, cloud FinOps help every team stay updated about their cloud costs depending upon their responsibilities. For instance, while the finance team views the cost reports and data, the engineering team can access the processor usage information. As a result, it leads to streamlined, effective, and unified operations. Challenges Of FinOps Although cloud FinOps is a great approach, it has its shortcomings. Many teams end up experiencing barriers to attaining business value. Some key challenges include: Difficulty understanding cloud costs One cannot trade off creativity and innovation for low cloud costs The DevOps teams may not exhaustively understand the financial processes Final Thoughts The cloud FinOps framework can significantly transform your company in all aspects. This operational framework enables you to optimize your company’s financial wellness while driving business value. However, to achieve the best results, you need to adopt the best practices and understand the principles and dynamics of this approach. Read Also: Top cloud security controls you should be using Hosted Mail Service That Runs on the Cloud Oracle & The Cloud: A Dream Team

Leverage EDI to Supercharge Data Exchange

In the present digital era, data exchange has a lot to do in turning a business triumphant and self-sufficient. The faster this process is, the better the outcome will be. The data exchange model underpins your company’s success. It encompasses a framework that enables business users to exchange information across multiple business ecosystems. For example, a manufacturing enterprise exchanges large volumes of data between distributors as well as supply chain ecosystems. In order to drive data exchange, enterprises must securely share data at the speed of business. In doing so, they must rely on electronic data exchange (EDI) technology. Not only it empowers business users to amplify data usage but also streamlines and accelerates communication. Nevertheless, a lot of companies still rely on legacy systems to kickstart B2B transactions that involve an exchange of important documents such as sales orders, purchase orders (PO), functional acknowledgment, or invoices. These systems, owing to their manual nature, can put a lot of burden on the IT teams. Further, they can slow down the processes, turning them error-prone and costly. In the end, companies become difficult to do business with. Next-gen EDI tools can be of great value here. Not only these solutions help drive data residing in the system but also those that are remotely positioned. EDI for Faster Data Exchange: Electronic data exchange platforms can help companies exchange data across the trading partner ecosystem in an automated manner. They maximize operational efficiency and enable business users to make successful business decisions. The importance of these platforms has grown in the current digital transformation age wherein, secure data exchange is deemed essential. Companies must have access to robust remote data exchange platforms to drive the exchange of data from remote collection points. By enabling secure remote exchange across their trading partner network, companies can maintain the security of data without much operational overhead. Value of EDI Integration: A lot of enterprises are choosing EDI to simplify their B2B transactions and exchange processes without sacrificing speed or complexity. But, to do so, one must have a deeper sense of understanding about the technology. Let’s explore how EDI integration works to dive deeper. EDI enables business users to take an integrated approach to deliver operational visibility, faster workflows, and improved customer service. Here are steps that play a crucial role. Step 1: The sender transfers the document such as the purchase order. The transfer happens from an in-house system or application. Step 2: The purchase order is then converted into the required EDI format with aid of techniques like mapping, data transformation, and more. Step 3: The EDI document is then allowed to run via a processor for structural accuracy. Step 4: The data is transmitted to a VAN with the help of protocols like SFTP, HTTPS, or AS2. Step 5: Ultimately, EDI is directed over AS2 and this allows companies to establish a connection with their trading partner ecosystem. As the file reaches the receiver finally, it undergoes verification and authentication followed by data ingestion. In the end, the receiver transmits information and acknowledges the delivery. How Does it Help Business Drive Forward? EDI integration empowers business users drive remote data exchange and B2B transactions without complexity. It has a lot to offer, from ensuring faster business data exchange to facilitating information accuracy. Here are some of the benefits. Better Efficiency through Automation: It simplifies operations and allows secure exchange of documents residing in the system and remote data collection points using automation. Not only it increases the speed of operations but also decreases errors with ease. Better Speed: It helps in cutting down the processing time, increasing the company’s time-to-value. Order-to-shipment cycles turn faster by 60%, and hence data exchange accelerates. Better Accuracy: Errors in data trigger disturbances in data flow and management. EDI integration automates B2B processes, making organizations easier to do business with. When companies rely on manual methods to do so, mistakes are bound to occur. Modern solutions turn these processes more accurate, eliminating risks of errors through manual intervention. Better Security: EDI is way faster and safer than legacy systems. It only authorizes selected personnel to access data, making processes secure than ever. Simply put, Companies can rapidly exchange data across various business ecosystems using a next-gen EDI integration solution. Read Also: Is A Time Card App Really Necessary? Data Points To Yes! Tips to Keep Your Photos and Data Save on Your Mobile Phone Is Big Data Capable Of Predicting The Next Best-Selling Book And Author: An Analysis

Why Should You Look Into Google Drive Alternatives?