Make the switch to OneDrive for improved productivity and cost savings

Today’s post was written by Ron Markezich, corporate vice president for Microsoft.

OneDrive makes sharing and file management easier in the cloud, enabling people to securely store, access, and share their files and photos from anywhere, across their devices. Choosing to store your files in OneDrive instead of other cloud storage providers allows you to work faster and smarter with Office 365. It’s the only service that provides real-time co-authoring within Office Online and the Office 2016 apps for mobile, PC, and Mac—as well as personalized search and discovery powered by the Microsoft Graph.

Customers like Accenture, DBS Bank, Textron, and Lowe’s have adopted OneDrive to reduce costs and improve teamwork and mobile productivity, while making it easier to protect and manage company data. Now your organization can switch to OneDrive for free—read on for all the details.

New offer to help you make the switch to OneDrive

We are making it easier for new customers to make the switch by offering free OneDrive for Business for the remaining term of their existing contract with Box, Dropbox, or Google. This offer is valid starting February 6, 2018 through June 30, 2018 for organizations that are not currently OneDrive for Business or Office 365 customers and who make a minimum 500 user commitment.

Customers participating in this offer can leverage Microsoft FastTrack—our customer success service—to make a smooth transition to OneDrive and Office 365. New and existing Office 365 customers can learn more about our on-boarding, user adoption, and migration services at fasttrack.microsoft.com.

“The FastTrack team helped us with best practices, documentation, and a pre-migration checklist. Given the number of people we wanted to migrate, it made sense to collaborate with them as much as we possibly could.”
—Justin Litherland, vice president, IT stores of Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

Learn more about this offer and start your transition to OneDrive.

Customers accelerating their digital transformation with OneDrive

More than 350,000 organizations now have OneDrive, and the growth has been amazing. Just in 2017, OneDrive storage and file sync usage have both tripled. This includes organizations large and small that are using OneDrive to:

  • Improve creativity and teamwork, from the corner office to the Firstline Workforce—Accenture uses OneDrive for their 400,000 employees as they travel the globe, accessing over two petabytes of files in the cloud across their devices. Lowe’s recently rolled out OneDrive to 260,000 employees—empowering them to share with colleagues and customers across their 2,200 retail stores.
  • Leverage the security, agility, and intelligence of the Microsoft Cloud—DBS Bank made the switch knowing Microsoft invests more in cloud security than a traditional bank could, and Land O’Lakes removed their need for multiple cloud storage providers by moving to OneDrive, giving them a managed solution to better protect their data.
  • Manage costs by moving to a single integrated solution with Office 365—Rackspace is saving over $411,000 a year by retiring their previous cloud storage provider in favor of OneDrive, and Textron is making the switch to OneDrive to get the improved governance they desire at a substantially lower cost.

If you want to see more reasons why customers choose OneDrive over Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive, check out our comparison chart.

Groundbreaking OneDrive product innovations

In addition to making it easier to switch, OneDrive is also leading with new innovations. At the Microsoft Ignite conference, we showcased over one hundred OneDrive features and enhancements delivered in the past year and announced new upcoming capabilities. Many of these have rolled out to customers, including:

  • Secured external file sharing without the need for a Microsoft account, giving users an easier way to share externally while providing IT departments visibility and control of what’s being shared. Learn more at the OneDrive Tech Community.
  • Support for browsing and managing all your files in OneDrive and SharePoint Online team sites without using local disk space with OneDrive Files On-Demand in Windows 10. For more details, read “OneDrive Files On-Demand for the Enterprise.”
  • Powerful multi-geo capabilities for OneDrive for Business in Office 365 to support the data residency requirements of multinational organizations.
  • Files Restore, a self-service recovery solution for OneDrive for Business files compromised due to accidental deletion, file corruption, or malware infection.
  • Making Office and OneDrive the best place to work on iOS with real-time co-authoring on Office documents, drag and drop support, and integration with the Apple Files app. Visit the OneDrive Tech Community to learn more.

Analyst recognition

As we continue to innovate the product and grow our customer base, analysts are taking note. Microsoft was recently recognized as a leader by Forrester Research in their report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms—Cloud Solutions, Q4 2017. In addition to being positioned as a leader, Microsoft was ranked highest in current offering and tied for second in strategy. Microsoft was also recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync and Share Platforms—Hybrid Solutions, Q4 2017 report. You can read more and get your own copy of the Forrester Research report.

Gartner also recognized Microsoft as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms and the highest of all the leaders in our ability to execute. You can read more and get your own copy of the Gartner report.

As you can see from these customer stories and analyst reviews, OneDrive with Office 365 isn’t just a cloud storage solution. It’s a core ingredient of the modern workplace. I look forward to hearing more about your success as you make the switch to OneDrive and Office 365!

—Ron Markezich

Gartner Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Source: Microsoft Office Blog