NFC Vault : Remote Access with File Transfer Acceleration

Do you have field technicians who need access to large building drawings and files? Do you have designers who work from home but need access to large Photoshop files? And these large files are stored on an on-premises file server that is not suitable for remote access?

If you rely on VPN to access large files from the corporate network, read on ...

Many companies have employees working in different cities and locations. To access the company's file servers, they usually resort to either a virtual private network (VPN) or remote desktop (RDP). Once the VPN or RDP connections are established, remote workers typically access the traditional mapped drive to access files and folders. File access is usually slow over the Internet, and if there is a network disruption, file access is interrupted.

Do you want to add these features to the VPN?

Offline Editing

A traditional VPN requires a stable and active connection to the corporate firewall to function. A disruption in the Internet or an interrupted connection to the firewall interrupts employees' work with unsaved files. With offline editing, remote workers can save and edit documents without an active connection and save the files asynchronously to a corporate file server once the connection is restored.

Always On

A firewall vendor typically offers VPN without an always-on feature. Always-on VPN requires more infrastructure components such as identity servers, authentication servers, compatible clients OS, etc. However, most modern cloud applications are always-on, allowing offline access to files and folders and storing files on a local device before synchronizing them with online servers.

High Performance

Accessing file servers is hardly high-performance, because when a VPN serves as an enabler, file access is done via the SMB/CIFS protocol. First of all, the SMB protocol is not a data streaming protocol with many requests and responses. If we can switch to HTTP streaming for file transfer, performance will improve. Second, HTTP-based file transfer traffic can take advantage of a global content delivery network, so HTTP is faster for cross-continent transfer.

High Performance - How does it work?

Offline editing, always-on and high performance are three key features that remote workers need from a VPN-less remote file access solution. Local file caching is an important method that provides the foundation for all three features.

Method #1 - Local File Caching

With a VPN solution, every time a file or folder is needed, the remote device must travel all the way back to the corporate network via a VPN. A better way is to store a copy on remote devices while monitoring file changes ("delta"). For cached files, access is local without network trips.

Method #2 - HTTP Streaming

VPN solutions use chatty SMB protocols requiring confirmations for each block. HTTP streaming sends blocks continuously without waiting for acknowledgments. Even SMB 3.0 has protocol negotiations that can slow transfers, while HTTP streams by default.

Method #3 - Parallel Transfer

Network bandwidth often exceeds single file transfer needs. Parallel transfers use 2-10 threads to increase speed without affecting other operations. This significantly reduces transfer time for large folders.

Other Acceleration Methods

Additional techniques include Amazon S3 global acceleration, Cloudflare's network routing, Azure multipart transfers, and binary delta sync to only transfer changed portions of files.

NFC Vault Solution

Mapped Drive

A mapped drive over the HTTPS channel to the corporate file server is an important feature. Employees are familiar with a mapped drive and no additional training is required.

File Locking

Most file sharing solutions provide manual file locking in the form of "check in" and "check out". NFC Vault provides automatic file locking by detecting requests to open files. When Microsoft Word opens a file, file locking is automatically initiated and automatically terminated when file processing is complete.

Active Directory

Enterprise users already have enterprise identities in Active Directory and the associated Active Directory federated service and SAML single sign-on. They do not need additional credentials to access a file sharing solution.

File Permissions

Finally, integration with Active Directory and NTFS permissions makes it easier for system administrators to set up permission control. The permissions features set Gladinet's solution apart from the competition.