One of my clients has moved all of his servers off site, contracting with a firm who provides 'cloud technology.' The transition took place in February and is being called the 'February Fiasco.' It took 4 weeks and parts of his busines still aren't completely functional. There continue to be performance problems, particularly with the AccPac accounting system, although it is greatly improved over the 90 minutes it took to open an invoice the first week! The current attempt to speed up data access is to install Remote Desktop Services on Server 2008. My application, as it currently runs on the LAN, has the app on the local machine, the SQL data on one server and supporting files on another. The shares are mapped as drive letters by a script that runs at login.

Once RDS is functional, my app will run on the RDS server of course, but I'm told there can't be any mapped drives. They want me to come up with another way for the app to find its data and supporting files. I am not a network expert and have NO experience with cloud technology. What other options are there? What is so different about 'cloud technology' that shares can't appear as mapped drives?