If you have a small business and you're looking for ways to improve your technical infrastructure, a NAS is one of the best ways to do it. I've helped out a few businesses at this stage with one, as while all of their needs were different, the best solution across many of them was a NAS to store data for ease of access.

As a result, I've compiled this list of ways a NAS might help your business, so you can get an idea of why it may be useful in your case too.

3 Sharing files with a team

No file conflicts

I've worked with many different businesses, and one difficulty that always comes up is storing files and accessing them as a team. While many use tools like OneDrive or Google Drive, the problem is that changes aren't always automatically synced. One person could be updating a spreadsheet of orders as another person in the other shop's location is doing the same thing. This results in file conflicts, and I've heard multiple stories of these places having to call the other store to ask them what they were doing and then having to work together to add to the file at the same time.

With a NAS, this problem can go away. While a Nextcloud instance will already remedy a lot of it as the files are synchronised automatically (Google Drive sometimes doesn't do it straight away), you can also install Nextcloud Office for editing files in your browser. For basic things like adding a new row of orders, this works perfectly and gets the job done. Pairing this with a good backup strategy is incredibly important.

2 Managing CCTV footage

Keep track of footage for longer

Depending on the system that you use to capture CCTV in your business, you may only have a short window of opportunity to retrieve it should something occur. With a NAS, you can automate the backing up and saving of these CCTV captures, and automatically delete old files periodically when you don't need them anymore.

As an example, I once worked with a business that could only retrieve 24-hours of CCTV footage at a time, and anything older was lost. With a NAS, we created a system that used ZoneMinder to pull video streams from the cameras and store them locally. We could then automate the removal of old files, which worked to serve as a more robust system for monitoring the workplace.

1 Access the network from anywhere

Access work files from home

Making it so that many business-related functions can only be accessed on the premisis is a common security tactic, but that has its disadvantages too. Most notably, that means you can't access something quickly if you need to while away, and you'll need to either go there yourself or get someone else to do it for you. With a VPN like WireGuard, you can configure it so that you can connect to the work network from anywhere in the world.

This is a pretty simple setup, and there are a lot of advantages to protecting your network this way. For example, this can be a great way to access your ZoneMinder so that you can see your CCTV in real-time. it can also allow you to keep two separate locations on the same network, such as if you have multiple stores.