Cloud Drive Mapper for transport and logistics

Transport and logistics operations are distributed by definition. Head office, regional dispatch, depots, satellite yards, warehouses, drivers criss-crossing regions and often borders, plus (for shipping and freight-forwarding operators) ports and cross-docking facilities. Every one of those locations depends on files being current, reachable and usable inside the transport management systems, fleet software and back-office applications the business runs on. Cloud Drive Mapper brings real-time Microsoft 365 file access to all of them, including Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix estates, without a VPN concentrator per site or a file server behind each dispatch office.

1.5M+ active users worldwide

~5,000 organisations run CDM

ISO 27001 certified since 2016

01

Real-time file access from head office to every depot and yard

Transport files change constantly. Dispatch schedules, driver rosters, compliance paperwork, customer contracts, safety documentation, maintenance records. When a document updates in head office, dispatchers in three depots and a night-shift supervisor at a fourth need to see the current version, not last night's cache. The OneDrive sync client's eventual-consistency model is a poor fit for that reality; the "which version is the current one" moment happens at exactly the wrong point in the operating day.

Cloud Drive Mapper works in real time. It talks directly to Microsoft Graph on demand, so a schedule change made in head office at 10am is the version a dispatcher sees when they open the file at 10.02am, from any depot on any device. No local mirror to reconcile, no propagation lag, no arguments over which spreadsheet is authoritative.

02

Full compatibility with transport management systems, fleet software and back-office applications

The software layer in a transport business is a mix of ages. Modern telematics platforms sit alongside transport management systems written in the 1990s, ERP back-offices from various vendors, and fleet-maintenance packages that expect a Windows drive letter or UNC path. Migration to SharePoint Online has stalled in many transport firms because those legacy applications simply do not understand cloud-file semantics.

Cloud Drive Mapper presents Microsoft 365 storage as virtual network drives with real file paths. Every application that expects a Z: or an S: drive gets one. TMS, fleet management, telematics with file-based exports, statutory compliance tools, driver-log software, back-office finance: if it works with a Windows file server, it works with CDM. Migration to Microsoft 365 no longer requires a parallel programme of application remediation.

03

Multi-site working without a VPN concentrator per depot

Most transport IT teams have historically wired their depots into head office through per-site VPN tunnels, or a central VPN concentrator sized for the peak of concurrent site connections. That infrastructure is expensive to run, awkward to scale as depots open and close, and a constant source of the "the VPN dropped again" tickets that eat IT time and dispatch time in equal measure.

Cloud Drive Mapper works directly over the internet using Microsoft Graph. Any depot, satellite office or driver laptop with a standard internet connection reaches the same drive letters and the same files as head office. The VPN infrastructure that used to be necessary for cross-site file access is not needed for that any more.

04

Familiar drive letters for dispatchers, admin, mechanics and back-office

Transport IT tends to be conservative for a good reason. Dispatch, admin, finance and maintenance staff work under time pressure with software that has to just work. Retraining a whole workforce on a new file-access model during operating hours is a change-management programme most transport IT teams cannot afford.

Cloud Drive Mapper looks like a file server to the user. The S: drive, the T: drive, the folder tree everyone has been using for years: still there, still exactly where it was. Staff open documents the way they always did, save them the way they always did, and never need to know that the storage behind it has moved to Microsoft 365. The help-desk queue does not spike; the migration is invisible where it needs to be invisible.

05

Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix and RDP estates handled properly

Many transport operators run AVD or Citrix to give dispatchers and back-office staff a consistent working environment across sites, and to keep sensitive data (customer contracts, financial records, employee 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 user's own laptop.

Cloud Drive Mapper is built for the way VDI actually works. On an AVD host, CDM is user-based: multiple users sharing one AVD server each see their own drive mappings inside their own session, exactly matching what they see on their laptop. That single behaviour has let transport operators retire RDP-server tiers that had been kept alive largely to serve file access, and stop the "leave the AVD session to find the file" workflow that had been costing dispatch time.

If it was not for Cloud Drive Mapper, we would not have moved from on-prem to SharePoint, because it was a blockage.
Ebrima Kalleh, Senior IT Systems Engineer, Premier Trailer Leasing

Read the full Premier Trailer Leasing case study →

06

Retire on-site file servers at head office and at every depot

Transport estates have a tendency to accumulate file servers: one at head office, often one per major depot, sometimes one at each regional maintenance hub. Each is a hardware refresh cycle waiting to happen, a backup and DR chain to keep running, and (for the depot-level servers) a piece of infrastructure sitting in a facility with no dedicated IT staff to care for it.

Cloud Drive Mapper turns Microsoft 365 into working file storage for the whole estate, from any location, over the internet. Once the migration is done, those depot-level and head-office file servers, their backup appliances and their DR chains can all be decommissioned. Every retired server is one less appliance in the estate refresh cycle, one less thing that gets forgotten in a depot storeroom, and one less place from which sensitive data could go missing.

07

Works across borders and Microsoft 365 cloud tenants

Many transport operators run across borders. A North American operator often has US, Canadian and Mexican operations on a single business footprint. A European operator may span multiple EU member states plus the UK. Each jurisdiction can have data-residency requirements, and each may run on a different Microsoft 365 tenant or a specific data-residency variant of the commercial tenant.

Cloud Drive Mapper is tenant-agnostic. It authenticates against whichever Microsoft 365 tenant you point it at, including data-residency-specific variants. The storage stays inside the jurisdiction its tenant is designed for; CDM simply presents that storage as a drive letter on the endpoint. Cross-border operations get a consistent file-access experience without cross-border data movement.

08

No persistent files on device, for laptops that travel with vehicles and staff

Transport laptops travel. They live in vehicles, get carried into customer sites, spend time on trains and in hotel rooms, and get left behind at rest stops. Devices go missing at rates that non-mobile industries do not experience. A file-sync model that leaves gigabytes of dispatch schedules, customer contracts, driver records and maintenance history 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 transport-business data at rest. Incident response is simpler: if a device is compromised, there is no local file inventory to enumerate.

09

Copilot-ready SharePoint content for compliance and safety documentation

Microsoft 365 Copilot only sees content that lives in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. Compliance documentation, driver handbooks, safety policies, standard operating procedures, incident-response playbooks: while these live on an on-premises file server or a network drive that Copilot cannot reach, they are effectively invisible to any AI-assisted workflow your organisation might build in the coming years.

Cloud Drive Mapper is what moves that content off the file server and into a place Copilot (and other Microsoft 365 AI tooling) can reach, at a schedule where you retain full control over what becomes indexable when. For transport operators with substantial compliance and safety document estates, that is a Copilot readiness gate that CDM directly unblocks.

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Frequently asked questions

Does Cloud Drive Mapper work over cellular or mobile connections that drivers and remote staff might use?

Yes, as long as the device has internet connectivity. Cloud Drive Mapper works over any internet connection: cellular, hotel wifi, satellite, or standard fixed-line. It streams file content on demand rather than syncing a full local mirror, so bandwidth requirements are proportional to files actively opened rather than total library size.

Does Cloud Drive Mapper support our transport management system's file-based exports?

Yes. CDM presents Microsoft 365 storage as virtual network drives with real file paths. Any application that reads or writes to a Windows drive letter, including TMS exports, fleet management report outputs, telematics data drops and finance system exports, sees CDM's drives as ordinary file storage and works without modification.

Can we deploy Cloud Drive Mapper across depots with no local IT staff?

Yes. Cloud Drive Mapper is a Windows client that installs onto individual PCs and can be centrally managed through Intune, Group Policy or your preferred endpoint-management tool. No depot-level server is required. Once deployed, CDM is largely self-managing; the ongoing operational load is closer to that of the Microsoft 365 client than a traditional server-based file service.

How does Cloud Drive Mapper handle staff working across international borders?

The same way it handles staff at head office. Cloud Drive Mapper authenticates against your Microsoft 365 tenant from any internet-connected Windows device. Cross-border operations work as long as the user has a valid identity in your tenant and internet access. Data stays inside your tenant's data-residency boundary throughout; CDM simply presents that storage as a drive letter on the endpoint.

Does IAM Cloud have access to our operational data?

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 own signed-in users can access your content through CDM, and only within their own existing M365 permissions. If IAM Cloud's cloud systems were compromised, an attacker would not, as a result, gain access to your data. Full technical detail is in the Zero-access architecture guide.