A 1 TB NAS in RAID-1 by Synology or QNAP will cost you about 400 EUR (including VAT). That's about 9% of what the author of the article paid for some 700 GB in Dropbox. It will do everything that Dropbox does, except you can use standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever) and the data will not leave your company.
That is a two-edged sword. The data is also inaccessible outside of your company. There are ways to make it accessible outside the company (VPN, WebDAV over https), but they tend to be complex, fragile, and sometimes unworkable (see next).
> standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever)
Support for the standard file sharing protocols (SMB, NFS, I presume AFS, and WebDAV) sucks or doesn't exist on mobile devices.
Also, most NAS vendors provide mobile applications, so you can access the data. They realize, that the standard protocols on mobile devices are lacking.
Anyway, to pay someone to get you such a NAS and configure everything for you is still a fraction of cost, that you would pay for cloud providers.
> to pay someone to get you such a NAS and configure everything for you is still a fraction of cost, that you would pay for cloud providers.
Dropbox for Business costs what, $75/month for 5 users? That's less than you'd pay for an hour of a competent person's time.
I'm not a huge fan of Dropbox for several of the reasons that have already been mentioned above (I use SpiderOak myself), but on these specific points they definitely beat the roll-your-own approach.
Only after a whole lot of hacking and you'll probably end up having to slap a real server in front of your NAS.
I haven't found anything, that Dropbox does that the NAS doesn't. Maybe there is some marginal function, I don't know. But is that hypothetical marginal function worth the 900% price premium (per year) plus reduced privacy?
(X) devices from both vendors you mentioned are pretty frequent victims
This applies to any service or device that you run. NAS is no exception. Your printer could be hacked, if you exposed it to the Net.
Data can be accidentaly deleted anywhere, cloud providers or your own storage. You must make backups anyway.
An exception is when you have a completely isolated LAN that's not serving internet-connected computers. But that's pretty spartan.
For smaller companies who don't want to manage infrastructure, the short answer is time.
* Setting up the NAS.
* Servicing the NAS when a drive fails.
* Setting up a backup for the NAS.
* Supporting people for connections to NAS
