Office 365 vs G-Suite & New Server

[Leggir]

I manage a small companies IT network and it's time for an upgrade, I'm looking for suggestions.

 

Business is a Sign Shop with 3 Employees and 7 Workstations, only the accounting files are off limits to 2 of the employees.

Currently they've got 1x SBS 2011 running ADS for user logins and serving files (Currently 1 TB). 

Each workstation has Windows 10 Pro, FlexiDesign, Corel Draw, Adobe Suite, MS Office 2016 Retail Pro Plus

Full backups are done every Thursday, with a daily differential every other day to a removable hard drive. Manual full server backups are performed to Amazon Glacier every other week. Using PowerToys, each users files are synced to the file server each day, before being sent to Glacier.

 

Ideally I'd like the owners (limited IT ability) to be able to administrate adding users, removing users, copying data from former users to new ones. I want users to just save their data a folder that'll I'll sync to the cloud.

I'm thinking of replacing the SBS server with a new PC that'll just serve files locally and will backup daily to the cloud. 

 

So, I need to choose a cloud suite. I'm leaning toward Google, but I've never used either before, as I'm an old MCSE 2000 that never upgraded. What do you recommend?

 

For a file server, I'm also debating what to go with. I'll probably build the server (obviously) and can put on SBS 2019, although this seems like overkill for serving files that everyone has access to. The new server will probably just be a Ryzen 5/16GB/NVME Boot/RAID 5 for storage/RAID 5 for local backup.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id really look at doing office 365 and then using azure directory for doing logins. 

 

30 minutes ago, Leggir said:

and can put on SBS 2019, although this seems like overkill for serving files that everyone has access to

what would use use for ad then?

 

31 minutes ago, Leggir said:

For a file server, I'm also debating what to go with. I'll probably build the server (obviously) and can put on SBS 2019, although this seems like overkill for serving files that everyone has access to. The new server will probably just be a Ryzen 5/16GB/NVME Boot/RAID 5 for storage/RAID 5 for local backup.

How big does this need to be, id just get a synology here, probably better than the extra desktop.

 

Or do you really need a file server? just do it with onedrive/gdrive and you should have plenty of storage.

 

 

[Salv8 (sam)]

3 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

azure directory

for this small business?

when they get to 10+ employees then they would benefit from a cloud active directory.

and even then they might just want it to be locally managed as much as possible for confidentially reasons when they do get to that point.

[Acedia]

On 6/19/2019 at 9:42 PM, Leggir said:

3 Employees and 7 Workstations

What are they doing with the other 4 workstations?

 

I can recommend Office365

[dalekphalm]

On 6/19/2019 at 4:14 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id really look at doing office 365 and then using azure directory for doing logins. 

 

what would use use for ad then?

 

How big does this need to be, id just get a synology here, probably better than the extra desktop.

 

Or do you really need a file server? just do it with onedrive/gdrive and you should have plenty of storage.

 

 

Agreed not a bad idea.

 

@Leggir

I'd actually still go with O365, but I'd suggest replacing Azure Directory w/ a Synology or QNAP NAS, with LDAP/Domain Services configured. We use O365 at work and it's very good. Bonus points if you get a subscription that also includes local Office installs, but you can go with a license that doesn't include that, and just buy (or continue to use) your own copies of locally installed Office anyway.

 

And in terms of your "storage server", if it's a pretty simple setup like you suggest, a NAS like Synology or QNAP would definitely serve their needs, and it comes with a warranty and software support - the owner (or you, I suppose) could just call up QNAP or Synology and ask them how to do something, and they'll help you through the whole process.

 

Adding and removing users would be stupid easy. And folder permissions would also be simple.

 

You can also still do incremental backups, etc (and even plug a USB HDD into the NAS), and it should still be able to offload to any major cloud service including Amazon.