Cloud Drive Mapper for professional services

Professional services firms (management consultancies, HR and recruitment agencies, business advisers, health & safety consultants, training providers, executive search firms) run on Microsoft 365 with a specific set of constraints: multi-client folder structures, sensitive client data, consultants working from home offices, client sites and hotel rooms, and (in older firms) file servers that have quietly outlived their useful life. Cloud Drive Mapper brings real-time Microsoft 365 file access to that reality without disrupting how consultants and admin staff work with files.

1.5M+ active users worldwide

~5,000 organisations run CDM

ISO 27001 certified since 2016

01

Multi-client folder structure preserved as it moves to SharePoint

Professional services firms organise their working files by client and engagement. Each client (or matter, or project) has a folder tree the whole firm recognises: current-engagement working papers, prior-engagement archive, correspondence, deliverables, contracts. Consultants and admin staff navigate that structure by muscle memory. Anything that disrupts it disrupts client work.

Cloud Drive Mapper maps SharePoint document libraries as drive letters. Whichever client-folder structure the firm has built up over the years survives the move to Microsoft 365 unchanged. Consultants open the same client folders the same way, from the same drive letters. The storage layer moves; nothing else has to.

02

Real-time access from head office, client sites and home offices

Consultants rarely work from one place all week. A typical week runs across head office, one or two client sites, a hotel room, a home office and (frequently) a train. When a colleague uploads a revised deliverable at 10am, the consultant reading it in a client meeting at 10.02am needs the current version, not last night's cached copy. Sync-based storage's eventual consistency is a poor fit for that rhythm.

Cloud Drive Mapper works in real time. It talks directly to Microsoft Graph on demand, so a document updated at head office is the version a consultant sees when they open the file, from anywhere with an internet connection. No local mirror to reconcile, no propagation lag, no arguments over which version is authoritative when a client is watching.

03

Works over hotel wifi, client-site guest networks, home broadband

Consultants routinely open files from networks they do not control: hotel wifi, client-site guest networks, serviced office wifi, home broadband and (occasionally) cellular hotspots. A file-access model that assumes a reliable corporate LAN, or that requires long-lived VPN tunnels, fails predictably in that environment.

Cloud Drive Mapper works over any internet connection. There is no VPN concentrator to sit behind and no per-consultant tunnel to keep alive. The drive letters appear when the machine has network, and streaming file access adapts to available bandwidth rather than trying to pre-download an entire library.

04

Familiar drive letters for consultants, admin and partners

Professional services firms tend to be conservative about how they work with files. Partners, consultants and admin staff have built up years of muscle memory for the S: drive, the client-folder tree, the templates library, the archive. A change to that experience during a delivery quarter is a change that gets noticed, and rarely in a good way.

Cloud Drive Mapper looks like a file server to the user. The drive letters the firm has been using for years: still there, still exactly where they were. Consultants open working documents the way they always did. Admin staff file client correspondence the way they always did. The storage behind it has moved to Microsoft 365, but the working experience did not change.

05

Retiring on-site file servers without changing the consultant workflow

Many firms still run one or more on-site file servers as the primary store for client working papers, often because earlier attempts to migrate to SharePoint foundered on user-experience issues. Cloud Drive Mapper removes the blocker. The move can happen without changing how partners, consultants or admin staff open, save or search for client files, because the drive letter stays the same.

For a firm's IT budget, this matters: server hardware refresh cycles avoided, on-site backup infrastructure retired, disaster-recovery scope reduced, and one fewer thing for a small IT team to look after. Once the file server is decommissioned, the SharePoint content becomes usable by Microsoft 365 Copilot as well.

My team had spent years relying on various network shares, running on local file servers. When we moved everything to the cloud, we migrated all of those shares to MS SharePoint and needed something to present those libraries to the team in a familiar way. Cloud Drive Mapper solved that problem for us and everyone continues to use their shared drives exactly as they did before. They are mostly unaware that the backend storage has changed.
Simon Brewster, Ellis David Limited

06

One storage layer for your firm and your client workspaces

Many firms share deliverables with clients through a portal of some description. Traditionally that has meant licensing or building separate portal infrastructure alongside the firm's own file storage. Microsoft 365 lets you collapse that split.

Your consultants work in SharePoint through Cloud Drive Mapper's familiar drive letters, and each client organisation is invited to its own SharePoint site as guest users, opening it in the browser or in Microsoft Teams. Cloud Drive Mapper is for users in your own tenant, so clients don't get mapped drives, but they see the same deliverables your team is working on. One storage layer, one access model, guest permissions giving each client visibility of only their own workspace.

07

Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix and RDP estates for sensitive client work

Firms working on sensitive client engagements often deliver that work through AVD, Citrix or an RDP tier to keep client data off local endpoints. The OneDrive sync client is a persistent problem in these environments: profile bloat, non-persistent-session failures, and file access that behaves differently inside a VDI session than on a partner's laptop.

Cloud Drive Mapper is built for the way VDI actually works. On an AVD or Citrix host, CDM is user-based: multiple consultants sharing one host each see their own drive mappings inside their own session, exactly matching what they see on their laptop. Consultants can move between physical and virtual workspaces without their client folder structure changing under them.

08

No persistent files on device, for laptops that travel with consultants

Consulting laptops travel. They go to client sites, on trains, in home offices, and (occasionally) get left behind. A file-sync model that leaves gigabytes of client engagement material, contracts, working papers and candidate CVs on the local disk of every laptop is a data-protection problem waiting to happen.

Cloud Drive Mapper does not create a persistent local cache of files. Content is streamed from Microsoft 365 to the device at the moment a user opens it, and released when they close it. A lost or stolen device does not contain a residual copy of client data at rest. Incident response is simpler: if a laptop is compromised, there is no local file inventory to enumerate.

09

Copilot-ready SharePoint content for firm knowledge and reusable IP

Microsoft 365 Copilot only sees content that lives in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Firm knowledge: proposal templates, prior-engagement work, reusable methodology, sector research, training material. While these live on an on-premises file server or a network drive Copilot cannot reach, they are invisible to any AI-assisted workflow the firm might build in the coming years.

Cloud Drive Mapper is what moves that content off the file server and into a place Copilot can reach, at a schedule where you retain full control over what becomes indexable when. For consultancies with substantial knowledge and methodology estates, that is a Copilot readiness gate CDM directly unblocks.

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Frequently asked questions

How does Cloud Drive Mapper handle a per-client folder structure?

CDM maps SharePoint document libraries as Windows drive letters. Whichever client-folder structure your firm has built up survives the move to Microsoft 365 unchanged. Consultants, admin staff and partners open the same client folders the same way, from the same drive letters. Client-level permissioning is enforced through SharePoint's native access controls, so each consultant sees only the clients they have access to.

How does Cloud Drive Mapper handle sensitive client data?

CDM streams file content from your Microsoft 365 tenant on demand and does not maintain a persistent local cache. Client data does not sit at rest on the endpoint between working sessions. Access is governed by delegated permissions inside your tenant. IAM Cloud holds no credentials to your tenant and has zero access to client content by design.

Does Cloud Drive Mapper work well for consultants who travel or work from home?

Yes. CDM works over any internet connection: home broadband, hotel wifi, cellular, or client-site guest wifi. Consultants get the same drive letters and the same client folders whether they are at head office, at a client, or working from home. Because there is no persistent local cache, there is nothing to synchronise when a laptop connects on a poor connection, and no client files sitting locally if the laptop is lost.

Can Cloud Drive Mapper give client organisations access to specific folders?

Not through Cloud Drive Mapper itself. CDM maps drives only for users in your own Microsoft 365 tenant; it doesn't support guest users. You can still share specific SharePoint sites or folders with client organisations as guest users, and they open them in the browser or in Microsoft Teams. Your consultants work on the same files through CDM's mapped drives, so there's no separate portal to run.

Does IAM Cloud have access to our client work?

No. Cloud Drive Mapper operates purely with delegated permissions inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. IAM Cloud holds no credentials that would authenticate to your tenant. Only your firm's signed-in users can access your content through CDM, and only within their existing M365 permissions. Full technical detail is in the Zero-access architecture solution.