I am sure everyone has heard of the “Cloud”, it basically means somewhere on the Internet, without being specific. Of course we all place our trust in this and anticipate that “somewhere” is safe and secure.
A Home-Start regional office contacted me with a problem. They were based in two locations. At least one of which was using a local government network and firewall before being able to access the internet. Cloud based file sharing systems such as DropBox were deliberately blocked by the firewall. In this case (understandably) it was the policy of the IT department to prevent files being sent out of the location to potentially insecure places.
The Home-Start regional office had a core set of files (probably procedures) that they wanted to share between the two sites. Such that both sites could edit them and save them back.
Using your hosting
Hosting disk space is generally limited, and today we all know that a few files can occupy Gigabytes of space. Especially if they are media related. However if you have say less than 200MB of files (in this case documents) that you want to share, then there may be a solution. Even through local government firewalls.
In this case the file sharing is being tested by the regional Home-Start office. The access method is through a private password protected page. Users accessing the files also need to be registered on the website. A further level of encryption is used to encrypt the files in the hosting with a common complex password known by both offices.
It is possible to go beyond this and run it over an SSL (https) connection however that will incur additional costs for your site.
I will take a look at this problem over the coming month and see what else could be provided. If you have an interest in having a private area of files in your hosting shared with satellite groups eith erthrough your site or independently then let me know.
Related:
If you do not have restrictions through the firewall at your location then look up the following services (of which there are many). One of these will enable you to do the same thing and possibly more elegantly: DropBox, LiveDrive, iCloud
Security
I do not recommend that anyone places files with personally identifiable information in any managed file sharing system unless they are absolutely sure about the integrity of the system. Even DropBox has allegedly failed in this regard several years ago (they have put procedures in place to prevent it happening again). The bottom line is if you are putting your security in the hands of someone else; if it is a free service then it is unlikely they are going to take a huge amount of care over you and your files. Somewhere in the small print will be a clause that lets your provider off of the hook.