As the head of a startup or a small business, it’s especially important to reduce your overhead costs and adhere to a strict budget to maintain your company’s future runway. However, being too frugal can have disastrous effects which will cost you more than the amount you had planned on saving initially.

Having multiple employees using a single account to save money is not an uncommon practice, but it is generally frowned upon as it compromises the standard of privacy your clients expect from managing their data. Instead, view the cost associated with providing multiple accounts as an investment that provides a solid form of insurance when things inevitably go wrong otherwise, whether it is by a malicious actor or inadvertently grave mistake.

Multiple accounts provide more autonomy to employees as they have the confidence in better managing your company’s data. Instead of having your data exposed to everyone and giving them the benefit of the doubt, it would be easier to sleep at night knowing that only those with sufficient privileges can access the files they’ve been assigned to work with. There are services with realistic pricing plans that enable members of your organization to securely collaborate and help automate parts of the laborious manual processes required to stay on top of things.

Access a detailed story of how your company collaborates

Cloud storage providers, such as Sync.com provide essential features for tracking changes in the events timeline. With only one account, it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible to track who made what changes to certain files. With multiple accounts, the events timeline provides insight into how employees are sharing and shaping your internal data through their individual contributions.

If files are accidentally deleted, you will know when and where to restore them. You will be met with fewer surprises when files are relocated elsewhere, as they are easier to track down. Mistakes are more readily fixable and preventable, and fewer employees will have the ability to purge deleted files, as you can restrict their ability to do so when you set up their account.

Employees will not have to view the event timeline for everything that everyone else is working on; they can quickly glean the events timeline for changes their collaborators have made. This will result in a reduction of time wasted from trivial conversations about updates to files and folders. Use shared folders to separate projects or create folders for each employee to place their assignments in. Files can be directly transferred to other employees without cluttering inboxes requesting coworkers to view attachments. Different employees can be given granular permissions when it comes to managing and editing files in shared folders. By restricting a colleague’s permissions to only viewing files, they can still obtain information from the files with Sync.com’s powerful file previews. This prevents them from accidentally modifying any data. Once a project is complete, the folders can be “unshared” and its contents can be remotely wiped from members’ devices.

Security through more effective controls

Insider attacks are on the rise. Given the privileges and data that are more accessible to employees than those outside your company’s firewall, these attacks are met with less resistance and are more successful. These are typically by employees who have left on bad terms and are vengeful or are being blackmailed by a hacking group.

If one of your employees who is working from whose device is hit with malware, only the data they have access to can be compromised. If your organization is hit by ransomware, the recovery process will be much faster as everyone will only have to resync the parts of the company’s data they had access to.

By having administrative control over separate accounts, you can change their password, view their files, or remotely wipe data stored on their account so they do not leave your organization with your precious data or serve as a vector to infect it.

Picking plans that cater to your needs and charge fairly

While Sync.com prides itself in keeping its clients’ data private and providing versatile collaboration features, it doesn’t snub businesses with intimidating pricing plans. While Dropbox for Teams and Tresorit may deliver on their promises, they do not accommodate for businesses of different sizes as much as Sync.com does and either lack sufficient storage space or provide extra features you might not need. Sync.com doesn’t compel you to upgrade by skimping out on one or two crucial features.

Here’s an overview of what some plans you might consider look like:

Dropbox for Teams

• Requires a minimum of three users
• Each user starts with three terabytes of storage
• Versions of files less than half a year old can be recovered
• Costs $450/year to start, or $150 per user!

Tresorit Small Business

• Requires a minimum of two users
• Each user gets a maximum of one terabyte of storage
• File shares are limited to only five gigabytes in size
• Costs $480/year to start, or $240 per user!

Sync.com Pro Business

• Requires a minimum of two users
• Each user starts with one terabyte of storage
• Files shares and not limited by size and the file version history goes back up to one year, with the option to upgrade.
• Costs $120/year to start, or $60 per user! The four terabyte and ten terabyte plans cost $96/user and $180/user respectively.

Sync.com’s plans for your teams are clearly more cost-effective per terabyte. The value of having file version histories of up to 365 days-long or more, an events timeline for changes made to files and folders, and unlimited file sharing is included for all plans. This enables businesses of every size to start with the same technological advantages without being overcharged no matter what they can afford.

Start provisioning multiple accounts today

While helpful for your business’s budget, Sync.com’s competitive pricing isn’t its only advantage. Sync.com meets your company’s complex needs; it’s products aren’t just places to rent and store your files. Instead of selling a fancy chat app that might turn meaning conversations into distracting chatter, integrating Sync.com upgrades your existing workflows.

Sync.com only requires you to change how you do things in a positive way. Fewer mistakes are made, fewer emails are being sent, fewer apps are needed, and integrating Sync.com doesn’t add anything unnecessary. Your team simply can keep doing whatever they usually would do when it comes working on files, but are empowered to do much more. The events timeline keep track of all changes are that made, so the need to communicate menial things over chat isn’t necessary. Since items can be shared and links via Sync.com’s web client panel, significantly fewer emails have to be sent. This reduces the risk of phishing, amount of scattered files, and roadblocks to productivity when handling large file shares. If files are deleted or hardware is damaged or compromised, the files are safe on the cloud and can easily be restored. Sync.com also helps you tackle the tedious but especially crucial aspects of running your business. Its HIPAA and GDPR compliance help you handle PHI and comply with strict regulations of managing the digital data of your clientele in the United States and across the EU. By being able to segment who has access to what data, having zero-knowledge encryption in place to prevent breaches from exposing files in plain-text, and sandboxing the data by excluding it from forms of communication that can be irreversibly leaked otherwise, your company can use Sync.com guilt-free. Consolidate your workflow, increase overall productivity, comply with various regulations, and reduce security risks, all with the simplicity and ease-of-use that Sync.com provides by signing up today.

Credits and Acknowledgements

The icons used in the image at the top of this post were made by fps web agency, Prosymbols, Freepik, Smashicons, and Kiranshastry from www.flaticon.com.