If your business uses G-Suite, then good news: you’re already subscribing to a cloud-based backup and synchronisation solution. How much capacity each user gets depends on your G-Suite subscription level. The G-Suite Basic tier has 30GB by default, with higher tiers providing unlimited storage and various options to individually upgrade a user’s drive to 100GB or 1TB.

Like Microsoft’s OneDrive-based cloud storage and other syncing-oriented services, it can be extremely useful if you or your corporate users want to access their files from multiple computers, or simply have all their work to hand when they move to a new workstation.

Google’s Backup and Sync tool works the same for business and home users, although the G-Suite version includes granular admin tools to enable features such as filestream – the ability to stream, rather than sync, G-Suite content – and offline access.

At install time, you’re prompted to choose which folders you want to back up and whether you’d rather have images and videos automatically compressed – for free storage – or left at their original quality. Other options here allow users to set upload and download speed limits, proxy settings and set specific file types to be excluded from their backups.

Note that, since July 2019, photos and videos are no longer made available via Google Drive, but instead can only be accessed through the Google Photos interface, although both Drive and uncompressed Photos content both still count towards your storage allowance. 

You’re then asked to choose whether you want to sync everything that’s already in your Google Drive, to copy nothing to the local hard disk, or to sync only selected folders. You can also change the default path of your Google Drive folder.

Once installed, users can dig through the advanced settings to have the application automatically back up files from connected cameras, SD cards and USB devices, and to configure it to automatically delete or retain synchronised copies of removed files.

The backup side of the utility is a more recent addition, but once again, it’s online only. You can’t use the Google Backup and Sync utility to backup data to your network or external storage media, even as an additional feature.

Whatever folders you’ve opted to back up – all the user’s files by default – are automatically copied to cloud storage, where their contents can be browsed and accessed online via the ‘Computers’ tab in the Grive web interface. 

Unlike your main Google Drive, where data is kept in sync between all connected devices, every computer the user adds gets a dedicated entry here. The folder structure is retained and there are no granular features to control whether or not specific file types are included in your backup.

You can’t schedule backups, but any files that change are instantly uploaded if you have an internet connection, or synced in bulk when you’re next online. By default, 100 versions of a file are saved, but you can manually switch particularly important files to unlimited versioning.

Note that the Backup and Sync application won’t let you back up your entire user space, let alone your entire computer. Your OS and software are beyond the scope of this one, even if you have the kind of internet connection that makes fully cloud-based backups a realistic prospect.

File recovery is a matter of re-downloading any lost files or old versions that you might need. You can download an entire system archive and move files from an old system to a newly-installed system’s synced folders, but this isn’t as smooth as the targeted recovery tools you’ll find in many more fully-featured backup utilities.

Google Drive is an excellent syncing tool and G-Suite using businesses will almost certainly want to have their users’ data synced – although those dealing with sensitive customer and financial data should restrict these files and consider using a private storage solution.

But despite having ‘Backup’ in the name, if you want any kind of disaster recovery protection, you’re probably still going to need a more sophisticated backup tool to work alongside Google Drive’s very capable file synchronisation.

If you’re looking for a simple, practical, cloud-hosted VoIP service, Sipgate Team could be your perfect solution. It comes with a solid track-record too, as Sipgate has been going strong since 2004.

One reason it’s lasted so long is value. A Light contract starts at £14.95 per month for three users, and can be upgraded in small increments, so your VoIP outgoings can scale organically with your business. To be clear, the headline price doesn’t include calls, which are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis; if you anticipate heavy usage, optional UK or EU add-on call packages can be added, with prices starting at £44.95 per month. 

Another extra to consider is the £20 porting service, which migrates your existing landline numbers over to your new VoIP account. Alternatively, you can request local, 0845, 0870 and international numbers – or settle for whatever Sipgate assigns to you.

Making the switch isn’t quite instant: you need a “start code” to authorise the process, and for security reasons Sipgate insists on sending this by post. We only had to wait three days for ours, however, during which time we were able to get a head start on configuring our users and phones.

That’s just as well because Sipgate doesn’t offer an import function, which means you’ll need to create each individual user account by hand. It’s not too tedious, though, and whenever a user is registered the system will automatically send them an email with login details for their personal web portal. 

The same applies when it comes to provisioning phones. Sipgate provides plenty of help with this – we were pleased to find clear screenshots showing exactly how to configure our Yealink handsets – but you’ll have to do the actual work yourself. 

With this done, the main web portal offers a handy administration page for quick access to all features. In the customisation section, you can brand the portal by uploading your company logo and providing an MP3 file for hold music, and there are plenty of call-handling features, including forwarding and hunting.

 To use these features you need to set up a user group, which gets its own phone number, voicemail and extension. You can then select whether you want all members’ phones to ring at once, or set them to ring in a specific order after a certain number of seconds has elapsed. For more advanced behaviours, you can configure multiple rules and set the time periods they should be active for. Voicemail and call forwarding can also be applied on a per-user basis with personal rules.

Another way to help callers reach the right person is by setting up an IVR (interactive voice response) service; this add-on feature, starting at £10 per month, can read out a list of up to ten options, to ensure calls are directed to the appropriate extension. You can create your own announcements either by uploading MP3 files, or by using the portal’s Click2Record feature, which lets you use a phone handset to record outgoing messages. Other optional features include group call queuing, presence (so you can see who is calling) and integration with Google’s G Suite.

If you want to take the app route, you should be aware that Sipgate doesn’t offer its own softphones, but the service works happily with a wide range of third-party products. For example, we found Zoiper quick and easy to configure and use on both Windows and iOS.

It all adds up to a hosted VoIP offering that’s well suited to small businesses. Don’t be put off by the manual phone provisioning and user setup – plenty of help is provided, and flexible licensing plans make Sipgate Team very cost-effective too.

UK-based Gradwell has been in the business communications market for over 20 years, and at the end of 2019 it launched its own cloud-hosted VoIP service. Wave has been designed from the ground up to address the needs of busy SMBs: it’s simple to deploy, easy to manage and packed with call-handling features, while offering per-user pricing that’s ideal for growing businesses.

Wave is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), so it offers good reliability and can scale easily to cope with heavy demand. And in case you’re worried about having all your eggs in one basket, be assured that Gradwell has deployed Wave across two different AWS sites as protection against unplanned outages.

Costs are easily managed: there are three Wave packages to choose from, which include different numbers of monthly call minutes to landlines and mobiles. The cheapest package is Wave 100, which costs £10 per user per month and includes 100 minutes of calls. Obviously that will cover only very light usage; if you need more, Wave 1000 starts at £13 and allows 1,000 minutes, while Wave 3000 costs from £18 and offers, you’ve guessed it, 3,000 minutes.

When you’re ready to sign up you can expect a personal service, with a Gradwell agent on hand to talk through your needs and help you pick a call package and choose phone numbers. Very little technical knowledge is required: Gradwell offered to handle the process of porting over our existing numbers, and creating a base set of users for us. To make sure we hit the ground running, the company also assigned a personal agent to take us through a detailed on-boarding session.

If you need them, Gradwell can even supply your VoIP handsets. Wave is currently geared up for Yealink phones, and we’ve no complaints about that as it’s the brand we choose for our own testing. A good range of models is on offer, from the basic T19 up to the slick CP960 conference phone. We went for T42S desk phones, and found that provisioning was almost a non-issue, as by the time they reached our offices their MAC addresses had already been added to our portal. All we had to do was connect the phones to our network, assign them to users and reboot and we were ready to go.

For those who prefer the soft approach, Gradwell has also created mobile apps for Android and iOS. We tried the iOS version on an iPad and were impressed by how easy it was to connect to a user’s account: all we had to do was enter the right username and password, or scan in a QR code from the user portal. There’s also a browser-based softphone for Google Chrome, which can be used to make calls, receive desktop notifications for incoming calls, create an address book and record calls to local storage.

Wave doesn’t currently offer users their own personal portal, but the administrative console contains all the user and phone-management tools you’d expect, along with a wealth of call-handling features. Hunt groups are easy to create: you simply pick an extension, then define a series of steps determining where to route calls if they go unanswered.

There’s also a good spread of features that some providers charge extra for. A flexible call queuing system includes options for advising that calls will be recorded, playing hold music and presenting reassuring messages to ensure callers don’t hang up. Voice menus are just as versatile, as you can record voice prompts from a phone or by uploading a WAV file to the portal. Calendar routes redirect calls during specified date periods (such as weekends or bank holidays), calls can be routed according to caller ID and pickup groups can be defined so that colleagues can answer other users’ phones.

If you’re looking for the smoothest possible transition to VoIP, Wave has you covered. It’s very easy to set up and manage and offers plenty of features for the price, making it a great fuss-free VoIP solution.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a well-featured monitoring solution – and it will particularly appeal if you’re already using other SolarWinds products, as it integrates into SolarWind’s central Orion web console.

New features in the latest release include a graphical view of usage and status details for Cisco Catalyst 2960 and Juniper EX-series switches. You can also now view real-time graphs of CPU, memory and interface usage for any node, while the addition of widgets to the page settings screen makes it easier to customise views for individual devices.

The Orion web server has been updated to improve performance. Having experienced issues ourselves with the speed of previous versions, we’re happy to say that pages now load noticeably more quickly.

Setting up NPM isn’t quite as swift as with some other products – it took us around 90 minutes from start to finish – but it’s very easy, with the installer automatically downloading all required components. The first time you visit the web console you’re greeted by a discovery wizard, which prompted us to enter our IP address ranges and subnets, along with details of our AD domain controllers and system credentials – and invited us to schedule regular re-runs of the discovery procedure.

Once the various items on your network have all been identified, colour-coded icons highlight device issues. The console’s Alerts & Activity tab provides an overview, from which you can focus in on the details to see exactly what the problem is. The Message Center, meanwhile, provides extensive search facilities, and alerts can be linked to actions such as sending SMS messages and emails.

One feature of NPM that we rate particularly highly is its customisable dashboards. When you first access the console you might feel overwhelmed by an avalanche of information, but a dashboard can be quickly modified by adding or removing columns and moving resource views around. If you run out of room, you can set up a big-screen NOC view that rotates through multiple dashboard views at predefined intervals.

Application monitoring is another strength: the Quality of Experience dashboard can identify, categorise and analyse traffic from over 1,500 applications. Sensors simply need to be connected to a switch mirror port, and if you install them on hosts already being monitored by NPM, they won’t consume an extra node licence.

Then there’s the NetPath feature. This probes external web locations and presents live maps showing latency and packet loss details for each hop, making it easy to pinpoint cloud service performance issues. Windows and Linux remote agents can securely monitor cloud servers or you can use Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure APIs which don’t require any NPM licenses.

And one of NPM’s cleverest features is PerfStack, which can help pinpoint the root cause of complex network problems by comparing a range of metrics from multiple systems. You can set these up using simple drag and drop manoeuvres, and choose a common time frame that makes it easy to compare metrics such as CPU or memory usage and identify which system is misbehaving.

The standard NPM package is more limited when it comes to VMware and Hyper-V hosts, with only basic availability monitoring included. If you want more, the optional Virtualisation Manager module adds datastore usage and capacity planning reports. 

Mobile support is comparatively weak, too: to access the console from our iPad, we had to install SolarWind’s separate Mobile Admin Server, which costs £533 – and, after linking the iOS app to it, we found the minimal information provided didn’t remotely justify the expense.

Although NPM has its shortcomings, its monitoring and troubleshooting tools can’t be faulted – and the web console is a pleasure to use, putting everything at your fingertips to ensure you don’t miss out on important information and issues.

If you want to keep your licensing simple, OpManager is sure to appeal: pricing is based solely on the number of monitored devices, regardless of how many interfaces or elements each one has, and it starts at just £188 for a perpetual ten-device licence. There’s also an annually licensed option, which includes the NetFlow, IP service-level agreement and deep packet inspection add-ons (which must otherwise be purchased separately). Whichever licensing model you pick, VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and Nutanix host monitoring come as standard.

This latest version of OpManager also supports Windows Server 2019 systems and improves integration with enterprise storage systems from the likes of Dell EMC and NetApp. Deployment is simpler than ever, thanks to over 8,000 predefined device templates, while dashboards can now be personalised for specific users, and alerting options include Slack and ServiceNow.

The software itself is quite light, so you don’t need to dedicate a host to its use. We had it up and running on a Windows 10 desktop in 15 minutes, and all it added was a single service and a default PostgreSQL database.

On first launch a discovery wizard steps you through entering IP address ranges, providing credentials and setting a schedule for future discovery runs. It took around ten minutes to then scan the lab network.

With this done, it’s time to turn to the OpManager web console. This can be accessed directly on the host or remotely and opens with a smart dashboard view. You can customise this with your choice of over 100 widgets, although you can’t tweak the total number of columns shown – this is determined by the size of the widgets and where you position them.

We found it a breeze to set up multiple dashboards showing details such as CPU and memory usage for individual devices, plus Active Directory availability and alarm summaries. The heatmap widget provides a grid of coloured blocks representing each device and their status, with quick links to each one, and you can set up multiple dashboard views with large-print displays, suitable for support departments.

All features are accessible from a clear ribbon menu across the top so we were quickly able to find and inspect our switches, printers, Windows servers and Linux-based NAS appliances. The virtualisation dashboard presented plenty of detail about our VMware ESXi and Hyper-V hosts too, and you can drill down to examine host storage devices and resource usage. The VM sprawl display, meanwhile, shows idle VMs, and those with over and under-provisioned CPU and RAM resources.

While there are a lot of features included in the price, one extra that’s worth considering is the Application Performance Management add-in, which adds details of an impressive range of applications, databases and cloud services. It snaps into the main OpManager web console, and we found it handy for keeping a close eye on our Amazon S3 cloud storage.

As for alerts, you don’t necessarily have to lift a finger: preset warning thresholds are assigned to all devices, and for the next release ManageEngine is working on adaptive thresholds that use AI and ML algorithms. If you want to get more hands-on, you can set up automated responses to specified conditions: the console’s Workflow Builder tool makes it easy to drag and drop conditions and actions, and apply them to critical devices.

Easy to deploy and simple to licence, ManageEngine’s OpManager Plus is a great choice for those who want to keep their management burden to a minimum – and its built-in virtualisation monitoring makes it tempting value.

If you have a diverse range of hardware and systems to keep an eye on, Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor could be the perfect solution. It supports no fewer than 257 sensor types – all of which are included in the standard package – so there’s a good chance it will work with everything on your network.

When we say everything, we mean it. PRTG can keep tabs on servers, switches, routers, Hyper-V, VMware and Citrix XenServer hosts, and plenty of cloud services, business apps and storage providers. And since the software updates itself automatically, you’ll get access to new capabilities as soon as they become available: the latest release brings a new health sensor for Fujitsu’s iRMC server management controller, and even expands into Internet of Things territory with a sensor that collects data from IoT-type devices.

Despite all this, you don’t need a powerful server to install the software. You can run PRTG locally on a modestly specified system, or let Paessler host it in the cloud for you. You don’t need to pay for more features than you need, either, thanks to Paessler’s sensor-based licensing. At first you might be alarmed to see how quickly your sensor count gets eaten up, but this is because when PRTG runs its first discovery, it automatically assigns a range of sensors to each device if finds: our Hyper-V server alone accounted for 51 sensors. Happily, it was easy to review these and delete the ones we didn’t require so they were available for use elsewhere. 

The discovery process also sets default alert triggers for each sensor, with alerting options that include mobile push notifications, email, Slack and Microsoft Teams. You can also set alerts to trigger actions such as restarting a service.

The main web console presents not only a complete status overview of your network, but a helpful tree view with all systems tidily organised into hierarchical groups. Moving devices between groups causes them to automatically inherit settings such as discovery schedules and login credentials. 

Spotting problems is easy, as sensors are colour-coded to indicate whether they’re in up, down, paused or warning states and you can instantly drill down into them for more detail. You can also pull up views of the top ten sensors for uptime, downtime, CPU usage, fastest website responses and more.

Cloud support is a real strength of PRTG. It includes seven different Amazon CloudWatch sensors, plus others for Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, while the SaaS sensor keeps an eye on cloud application platforms such as Office 365. Server hardware gets plenty of attention, too: along with a global IPMI sensor, PRTG can directly monitor Dell’s iDRAC controllers and report on physical storage devices and power.

As an alternative to using the web console, PRTG also comes with native Windows and macOS desktop apps, which replace the older PRTG Enterprise console. Alongside full device tree views, the Windows app allowed us to manage sensors, edit multiple objects, drag and drop devices into new groups and enable system tray alerts. The free Android and iOS apps are excellent, giving you convenient remote access to the PRTG server and all sensor data. With the app loaded on our iPad, we had no problem connecting to the core PRTG server, pulling up sensor data on selected systems and receiving push notifications when sensor thresholds were breached.

Businesses that want to monitor everything on their network without having to worry about extra costs or unsupported devices will find Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor a fine choice. It dishes out sensors a bit more liberally than you’ll probably want, but these can be easily moved to where they’re needed, resulting in a monitoring solution that’s not only highly capable but good value.

​Panda’s Adaptive Defense 360 (AD360) takes cloud-hosted security to the next level, combining a wealth of endpoint protection features with data control, encryption and patch management tools. This makes it appealing to businesses with GDPR compliance on their minds, as they can protect endpoints from malware, keep them updated with the latest patches and stop data containing PII (personally identifiable information) from leaking, all with a single tool.

AD360’s advanced protection module analyses and classifies every application being run on Windows endpoints and only blocks those it doesn’t know about. It doesn’t stop them from running permanently though; Panda’s cloud service checks the app’s security posture in the background and, if it’s deemed to be safe, will instruct the endpoint client to allow it through.

AD360’s endpoint protection features are extensive, including file, email and web antivirus, a firewall, web filtering and removable device controls for Windows systems. Exchange servers are supported too, and AD360 provides separate antivirus, antispam and attachment content filtering components.

The data protection module scans protected endpoints using machine learning algorithms and regular expressions to detect PII content in a wide range of file formats. It keeps track of all activity and can tell you what each user has been doing with these files such as opening, editing and renaming them, sending and receiving them via email or copying them to removable media.

Panda Adaptive Defense 360 review: Deployment

Deployment is undemanding, thanks to endpoint agents for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, which can be downloaded from the portal or emailed as a web link. A quicker option for installation on the LAN is to install the agent on one machine first and designate it as a discovery computer.

This scans the network and presents a list of all discovered devices, where you select them and push the agent out remotely. Either way, it only took us a minute to load it on each of our Windows 10 clients after which it contacted the cloud service and applied all our predefined settings. 

All endpoints are dropped into a default group with a base security profile for immediate protection but you can easily create your own groups, each with a set of custom profiles. These are used to define active security services, firewall rules and update frequency while web filtering offers over 60 categories to block or allow and can use daily schedules to determine when it was active.

Initially, you run the advanced protection in ‘audit’ mode where it gathers information about your everyday apps. When you’re ready, you can set it to ‘hardening’ mode which will block unknown external programs until they’ve been assessed, while the ‘lock’ mode includes all local apps as well.

Panda Adaptive Defense 360 review: Patch management

Patch management is an optional feature and requires the endpoint protection or adaptive defense components to be licensed. As with Avast’s Business Patch Management (BPM), it can’t be run on its own but Panda has made a far more professional job of implementing it.

Panda requires Windows automatic updates to be disabled and, unlike Avast’s BPM, it’s all done for you. When creating a patch management policy, you can request automatic updates to be disabled and we found it worked perfectly on all our Windows 10 test clients with no manual intervention required.

Profiles determine a scan frequency of between one hour and once a day and after scanning all our clients, Panda created a list of available updates separated into five criticality levels along with non-security related and service pack groups. Tasks are used to deploy patches and include client groups, a schedule, selected patch groups and third-party products from the software inventory that you also want patched.

Panda then just gets on with the job of patching and provides a task status view that shows which clients are patched and those in progress. If users try to reboot their system during this process, they’ll receive a pop-up message advising them that patching is in progress.

Panda Adaptive Defense 360 review: Data control

The data control component is fully integrated into the web portal and uses profiles to determine what it should search for. To scan and index Office documents, each Windows endpoint requires the Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0 installed which we downloaded straight from the AD360 portal.

You can choose to index only text files but if you opt to index everything on each client, the first run will take many hours and possibly a day. Even so, it’s worth the wait as Panda came back with a heap of valuable information about files residing on our clients that contained PII.

The portal separates them into groups such as personal ID, passport, credit card and phone numbers, email addresses plus bank account details and clicking on a graph category takes you to a list of clients with details of the exact file locations. We could run advanced searches on selected clients to look for keywords and phrases in a range of file types and use the portal to remotely delete unwanted files.

The advanced visualization tool takes this further as it’ll tell you what actions have been carried on these files and when, the application that accessed them, the user responsible and exfiltration risk levels. It provides a lot more information than this though, as it can present detailed reports and graphs on security incidents, malware detections and app controls.

Panda Adaptive Defense 360 review: Verdict

Panda’s Adaptive Defense 360 is a clever cloud security solution that delivers a wealth of endpoint protection features at a great price. It’s easy to deploy and manage, offers sophisticated data control features and whereas other security vendors stumble with patch management, Panda has perfected it.

​One of Europe’s largest hosting companies, 1&1 Ionos is a relative newcomer to the file-sharing party, with its HiDrive service offering a simple cloud file syncing and collaboration solution.

Three plans are available: we tested the top-dog Pro option, which starts at ten users and dishes up 2TB of cloud storage for £20 per month on a one-year contract. That may sound like a bargain, but note that your 2TB isn’t per user, but a total that’s shared across all users.

One notable thing about HiDrive is that it includes a backup service that creates copies of all of your cloud data and retains them for up to a year. This isn’t as smart as the file versioning systems offered by many competitors, but it can be run as often as every four hours, and lets users easily download selected backups from the cloud. The only catch is that these backups count against your storage allocation.

Adding new members to your team is a breeze: invitations can be emailed from the cloud portal and you can choose whether or not each account gets administrative privileges. On opening the invitation, new users will find a link to the web portal, from which they can download the HiDrive desktop app for Windows and choose which cloud folders they want synced to their desktop. Cloud folders can also be conveniently mapped to a local password-protected drive letter. 

If your office runs entirely on Windows, this is great – but be aware that there’s no desktop client for Mac and Linux users, so they will need to use the web portal to get at their data. Alternatively, the administrator can enable access via various protocols, including CIFS/SMB, WebDAV, FTP, SFTP and rsync. Another option is to use the HiDrive mobile apps: the iOS version, running on our iPad, let us view all our cloud data, upload and share files, use the camera to scan documents to the cloud and back the device up.

Another limitation of HiDrive is that it doesn’t give users the ability to share their own personal folders with other team members – something that most competing solutions allow. It does, however, provide a general-access Public folder, which you can make available to all users, and which everyone can optionally synchronise to their desktop like a personal folder. 

While users can’t share folders, they can securely send file links to others – including those without a HiDrive account – directly from either the web portal or Windows Explorer. It’s good to see that, when creating a link, you’re prompted to apply password protection, a download limit and an expiry date. You can also send email requests to non-HiDrive users inviting them to upload files to a password-protected folder.

All data is secured in transit using SSL and encrypted on the HiDrive cloud servers; if you choose the Pro plan then there’s also an end-to-end encryption option, although, surprisingly, it’s actually left to the user to choose whether to apply this and to manage their own encryption keys – something we suspect administrators won’t be delighted about.

The Pro plan also includes a scheduled device backup function, allowing users to have selected local folders automatically copied up to the cloud. Data can be restored from the desktop app or from the portal; again, though, administrators have no control over these processes.

At £20 per month for a shared 2TB of cloud storage, HiDrive Business Pro isn’t the cheapest cloud file-sharing solution out there, and we would be happier if managers were able to take full control of user activities. It is easy to use, though, making it a good fit for smaller businesses seeking uncomplicated file-sharing and syncing services for Windows.

​

Box is one of the most capable file-sharing services on the market, offering a great range of cloud collaboration features. Those come at a price, mind you: the Business Plus version on review costs £20 per user each month, with a modest 5% discount if you pay yearly.

Still, we can’t complain too much when every user gets a classy selection of file-sharing and syncing services, and unlimited cloud storage. Or, to be precise, there’s no limit on total usage; – there’s a 5GB limit on the size of each uploaded item, which is a long way short of Citrix ShareFile’s 100GB cap, but for the average small business that won’t be a problem at all. 

Administrators, meanwhile, get a wealth of management tools, with features including user activity tracking and enhanced reporting. If your business has data residency requirements, you can take advantage of the Box Zones add-on, which lets you choose precisely where your files will be stored. Options include AWS in London and Azure in Cardiff, with pricing starting at £4 per month – although you should note that Box Zones is only available to customers with a minimum of ten users.

To set users up on Box, you simply send each one an email invitation from the Box admin portal. After they have accepted, they will be able to log in to their personal cloud portal, view their cloud folders, create new ones and invite colleagues to share their contents. Box lets you finely specify exactly what sort of access each collaborator should have, with seven permission levels ranging from view-only to co-owner.

It’s also possible to securely share files with collaborators outside of the company, by enabling the Share Link option and sending an email. If you want to receive a file from someone else, you can generate a secure link that allows them to upload a file directly to your cloud folder. 

One aspect of Box that’s a bit confusing is the way it presents a choice of two different client apps to download. Box Sync provides standard syncing services between a user’s local folder and their cloud repository to ensure all versions are kept up to date, while Box Drive aims to save local hard disk space by keeping all your folders in the cloud – although you can select specific files and folders for offline access. It may not be obvious to a user which one they should install, and the two apps won’t coexist on the same system so a little support might be necessary to help people get the right client. 

You might also be disappointed to discover that, although you can grant folder access to an unlimited number of collaborators – including those outside of your organisation – each one needs their own Box account to access the share.

On the plus side, Box can do some very clever and useful things. File versioning is included as standard: Starter subscriptions get access to 25 old versions, while Business Plus customers get 50 versions and the Enterprise tier ups the limit to 100. The free Box Tools utility lets you edit documents in the cloud, too – a clever trick, although it’s a bit annoying that Microsoft Edge isn’t currently supported.

Then there’s the free Box Relay Lite automation tool, which lets you create simple workflows that can, for example, move newly uploaded files from one folder to another, or ask another user for approval. On top of all this, the Business Plus subscription also supports up to three SaaS integrations with external apps, such as Slack and Salesforce. 

The choice of desktop apps may confuse users, but overall Box is an excellent package of cloud file-sharing and collaboration services. The Business Plus plan is expensive, but if you want top-notch security, an insight into user activity and the ability to choose where their data resides, it’s very hard to beat. 

AWS is the big daddy of cloud service providers. It provides the backend infrastructure for half the online services you’ve ever heard of, and it could do the same for your office.

It’s increasingly practical to move small and medium enterprise business networks and servers into the cloud as infrastructure as a service. Unusually – and conspicuously unlike rival platforms from Microsoft and Google – AWS can provide virtualised desktop workstations, as well as core infrastructure.

In this review, we’ll focus on infrastructure and services that can be readily migrated to the cloud – primarily core servers, directory services and a virtual private cloud to both handle virtual networking and provide a VPN endpoint to connect your business’s physical machines to your online infrastructure.

Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktops could also be of particular value to firms with significant remote workforces. All of these options can represent significant savings on capital expenditure and, particularly with virtual desktops, provide a secure alternative to having staff work from their own PCs.

Amazon says it strives for 99.99% uptime in each AWS region and, if it does go down, provides credits that can be spent on affected services. You can choose which region to host your services in, which can potentially help with both legal compliance and performance for people connecting from that region.

Amazon Web Services review: Deployment

AWS has a frankly dizzying array of features, from machine learning testbeds to augmented reality application development and Internet of Things connection kits, but we’re interested in servers and networking to support a standard office.

For this, you’ll want to deploy a Virtual Private Cloud and, on that, deploy any servers to handle whatever single sign-on, storage and database needs your business has. VPCs are easy to manage if you’re already confident with network infrastructure, but to connect your office to your cloud-based network, you’ll need a fast internet connection and a firewall router powerful enough to handle a high-throughput VPN connection.

When deploying VMs, you can’t just upload an ISO of your choosing and install that – only a rather limited list of Windows and Linux versions are available to install. However, it is possible to upload a VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V or Azure virtual machine image via an Amazon S3 storage bucket or – easier still – via the AWS Server Migration Service and connector software installed on your existing platform.

Amazon Web Services review: Pricing

No matter which data centre region you’re based in, in the world of AWS, everything is in US dollars, right up until the point at which your final bill is calculated in your choice of currency, based on Amazon’s internal exchange rate.

This can be rather annoying, particularly when the pound undergoes major fluctuations due to political events, as it makes your month-to-month costs less consistent than they otherwise would be.

The default option for your AWS deployments is its On-Demand pay-as-you-go pricing. However, as with Microsoft Azure, you can save money if you deploy longer-term reserved instances for any virtual infrastructure that you plan on leaving in operation for an extended period.

Needless to say, the exact costs of any deployments will vary widely depending on your exact needs. To provide a basic example, we use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to cost up a single general-purpose virtual machine running Windows Server on a two-core, 8GB VM with a ‘moderate’ connection – estimated by various third party tests at around 300Mbit/sec – costs $152.26 per month, plus $36.60 for a 1024GB HDD.

The speed of that network connection makes a great difference to pricing: two cores and 8GB RAM on an up-to-10GB/sec connection cost $282.56 per month. A little less variably, an Active Directory connector starts at $43.92 and a Virtual PrivateCloud at $36.60 per month for a single connection from your office router.

Critically, the estimation tool – unlike Azure’s – won’t generate a baseline estimate of how much data in and out a business might use every month. You’ll have to estimate that manually: at an estimated 100GB per month in and out (only outbound traffic costs anything in this scenario), we’d pay $17.91 per month.

That adds up to $294.71 (£242.53) per month, including a small free tier discount. For Windows servers, Microsoft’s Azure platform is much more competitive at the moment: £196.68 per month will get you a similar setup.

A lot of that is to do with the cost of licencing Windows, which Microsoft can subsidise for Azure users. Switch that AWS server VM to Linux, and it’ll cost $84.92 per month, rather than $152.26.

Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktop computers start at $7.25 per month plus $0.17 per hour of active use (or a flat $21 per month) for a Linux desktop system and $7.25 per month and $0.22 per hour (or a flat $25 per month) for a Windows desktop, with one core, 2GB RAM, an 80GB root volume and 10GB of user storage.

AWS can sometimes spring unexpected costs on you, for example by billing hourly for IP addresses that were once attached to a terminated VM. Similarly, leftover key pairs and storage drives associated with virtual machine instances incur charges if they’re not manually deleted when an instance is.

Data throughput and the sometimes arcane relationships between services can also add to the cost of AWS deployments, and you might miss out on its free intra-region data transfer fees if you don’t set everything up correctly.

In the case of a Virtual Private Cloud, you’ll have to create a specific subnet endpoint pointing at the AWS service you’re trying to connect to in order to benefit from free throughput: connecting to a public IP address provided by the service will result in data transfer being billed as though it was going to a location on the wider internet, rather than inside AWS.

Like Microsoft and Google, AWS provides a wide range of free services intended to allow administrators to extensively prototype and test cloud-based systems and services for their business, from short-term free trials to always-free services and free 12-month subscriptions for new AWS subscribers.

In the latter category, new users can run up to 750 hours a month of Linux and Windows EC2 Micro virtual machine instances, 5GB of S3 storage, various Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktop and AppSteam always-available desktop application streaming bundles, 750 hours of database services and more.

In the Always Free category, you’ll get 10 CloudWatch resource monitoring deployments, 62,000 outbound email messages, 10GB of Glacier cold storage, key and licence management, 100GB of hybrid cloud storage, and Amazon’s Chime unified communications platform among other bits and pieces.

Amazon Web Services review: User interface

The AWS Management Console is a lot nicer to look at and carry out day-to-day management and deployment tasks with than Microsoft’s rival Azure platform. There’s more white space and fewer immediately visible options, which helps to make it feel less cluttered.

Your most recently visited services are front and centre, and you can open a full list of every single one of AWS’ vast catalogue of services. At the top of the page is a search interface, where you can search for services by name or function, so if you search for ‘virtual desktop’, you’ll be directed to WorkSpace and if you search for ‘cold storage’, S3 Glacier pops up.

Below, a range of wizards and tutorials are available to help you deploy and work with popular services such as virtual machines, virtual servers and hosted web apps. Each service has its own management interface which, again, are a little more comfortable to use than Azure’s.

However, there’s a distinct design language at work here that you’ll have to get used to, particularly if you’re primarily familiar with Microsoft’s Server and cloud products. We were pleased to find that free-tier eligible options were clearly marked when we used the VM deployment wizard, which also provides helpful guidance when it comes to keeping your deployments secure, such as locking access to specific IP addresses.

Amazon Web Services review: Verdict

Even compared to its closest competitors, AWS is complex, both in terms of features and pricing, although a well-designed interface does its best to make things simple. When working with AWS, it’s worth using Amazon’s quote generator and cost management tools to ensure that you aren’t running up unexpected expenses, and you’ll have to remember to include data throughput costs in your estimates, as they’re not typically bundled.

AWS’ ubiquity speaks for itself: although its layers upon layers of features are confusing, it’s reliable, highly flexible, can be immensely cost-effective and offers a wider range of services than any of its rivals. However, to make the most of it, your business will need a dedicated expert, either in-house or as contracted support.

By comparison, Microsoft’s Azure isn’t significantly easier to use, but its management interface will feel a bit more familiar to Windows sysadmins and its pricing for Windows-based services is cheaper than AWS’, making it a better option for most office infrastructure migrations.