Business Central / NAV UG
Experts:
SECURITY- File Storage and Business Central
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SECURITY- File Storage and Business Central
Currently on BC 14, upgrading to BC23, and had a bomb dropped in our laps last week in finding out that even though we subscribed to on-prem, we are expected to use Sharepoint if we wish to create links to files pertinent to orders. I am aware that many if not most companies do use Sharepoint. However I’m not crazy about this idea because I’ve seen users sync too many files, cripple their local drives, and then delete the files (which also deletes them from SP). Also because of the load on the local users computer (it’s a lot of files changed daily and many remote users). But mostly I am concerned about diminished security. That’s WHY we stayed on-prem. Advice please?
– Putting our IP in Sharepoint removes it from behind our VPN/firewall. It seems that data would be less protected if in Sharepoint. True?
– Further, the deleted file retention time for Sharepoint was only 30 days last I checked. How do I maintain backups for Sharepoint files using air-gapped, immutable offsite backups for a cloud storage system? Am I also sacrificing our backup config by putting data in Sharepoint?
Thanks for any insights. Sad to say this entire upgrade process has not been a pleasant experience. So much functionality lost, too many last minute surprises.
-d.
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1 Reply
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Sorry to hear your upgrade experience has not been that great. It sounds like 14-23 is a pretty big jump, so I’d guess you have a ton of customized features that may take a while to re-build. I can’t speak for the NAV on-prem environment, but we just moved from another on-prem ERP to BC-online, and also struggled with the best way to attach documents.
The SharePoint route is great if you need to share documents outside of BC as part of a library, but I agree with you that it’s less than ideal keeping in sync with the ERP security, and if you’re syncing SharePoint folders with users PC’s you’re storing the files in multiple places. I know that BC online still supports attachments stored inside the database, so I’m a little mystified why that wouldn’t be supported on-prem, unless you have a medium-term goal of moving online. I would look to the reasoning that’s requiring SharePoint online – there are many other ways that attachments can be stored. You could even store it in SharePoint on-prem, but now it’s getting more expensive.I would hazard a guess that you may have multiple levels of attachments, i.e. vendor invoices and customer agreements may be well suited to a semi-shared SharePoint environment, but if you have more sensitive IP, you may want to treat that differently, but still support the ‘basic’ accounting users. If it were me, and I had to store sensitive IP as attachments that had to be in a cloud environment, I’d look at buying or building a solution that would store the documents in Azure blob storage. You can secure blob storage pretty tightly with file encryption, certificates and limited user access. It’s easily backed up and/or replicated in a myriad of different ways. Then BC is your one-and-only source of truth for end-user security access. You might take a look at Microsoft App source, I did a quick search and found this option: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/dynamics-365-business-central/PUBID.winspiresolutions-sg|AID.abs_attachments|PAPPID.2ae43052-0f98-4eeb-b456-589c0bfbca4e?tab=Overview. A free third party solution with SharePoint that doesn’t require syncing SharePoint folders to the PC is DocXtender. It works well for our purposes, but still have a separate SharePoint site and it’s security model to maintain.
If you absolutely have to use SharePoint online, I’d recommend looking at Barracuda cloud backup. While still a cloud service and not truly air gapped, they very affordably back up our entire cloud tenant, and as I understand it, have several layers of storage that would ensure it can be restored if the primary source is corrupted. We have used their backup appliances and firewalls for years with great success.
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