Gladinet Offers Simple Cloud Storage Access to Smaller Businesses

Gladinet (http://www.gladinet.com) rolled out Gladinet Cloud Gateway v1.0 and Cloud Desktop v1.3 on October 26, 2009. Both are designed to meet the cloud computing needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The concept is an elegant and simple extension of the widely-used Network File System protocol( NFS) or Network Attached File Storage (NAS) to the Cloud.

 Cloud Desktop lets a user access Cloud Storage such as Amazon’s EC2 or AT&T’s Synoptic Storage as a Service as though it were a local or network-attached disk drive. Google is reportedly headed in the same direction with the long-rumored GDrive which is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”(See http://tinyurl.com/d749ym.)

 Cloud Gateway extends the concept to all users in a network. It acts as a file server connecting individual desktops to cloud storage through one access point.

“Cloud Gateway acts as a liaison between Cloud Desktop and cloud storage,” explained Gladinet co-founder Jerry Huang. “Before, if a company had 100 employees using Cloud Desktop, they needed 100 connections to Amazon S3, Google Docs or whatever services their employees were using. With the Gateway, that’s all changed. Now SMBs only need Cloud Gateway to connect to cloud services, regardless of how many different interfaces or accounts they may have. The Gateway acts as a file server to the Desktops, which simply connect to it over their LAN.”

In fact, Cloud Gateway allows one server to support many individual desktops. In doing so, the application gives SMBs the freedom to scale back their own data storage capacity while providing reliable, centralized administration and backup capability. Files stored at various offsite data centers are as easy to access as if they resided on the user’s hard drive. Thanks to Cloud Gateway’s use of smart caching, copies of files stored with cloud services are quickly accessible on local desktops - eliminating the problem of lost data in the event of cloud service business closures.

Though robust and highly scalable, Gladinet Cloud Desktop and Cloud Gateway are extremely user-friendly even for technophobes. Once configured by an administrator, Cloud Gateway is available to every Cloud Desktop user in a company and requires no account information to be entered by individual users, no matter how many different cloud services they’re using.

Gladinet, founded in 2008, launched its cloud services to the industry in spring 2009 with the release of Gladinet Cloud Desktop 1.0 and v1.1.

To EyeOnTheCloud, it’s a company worth watching.