<p>Rebekah Jubb: With Skydrive Pro on each of our laptops we are confident that our files are all securely backed up. Photograph: Ron Chapple Stock / Alamy/Alamy</p><p>Established over 25 years ago, Bell Cornwell is a chartered town planning consultancy, undertaking projects ranging from individual household property extensions to large scale commercial developments covering land use planning and associated issues. With 19 staff spread over three offices, the majority of staff are planning consultants, where a typical day entails the compilation of large reports for our clients, which contain lots of photos and graphics such as plans, maps and photographs, as well as reviewing many large pdf files sometimes in excess of 100MB. We are increasingly running entire projects electronically, including submission of planning applications and appeals, so rely very heavily on our IT system.</p><p>We used to store these reports on an on-premise Windows server in the main office and when working remotely, the only way to access my files was to dial in to my laptop which was left on my desk at the office in order to connect to the network. As you can imagine, accessing this heavy graphical content was a painstakingly slow process and reduced my ability to respond to clients' needs.</p><p>As planning consultants, time is our asset to sell our expertise, so, in reality, the majority of us were storing all our documents locally to our laptops so we could work remotely much more productively. Of course, this meant that valuable information wasn't always backed up straight away nor was it centrally available on the servers for compliance and for other staff to access. Also, the satellite offices had no access to the main server and could only store data locally. They often felt detached from the rest of the company.</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-microsoft/office-365-revolutionises-planning-consultancy">Keep reading...</a></p>