After pioneering the concept of integrating a wide range of cloud services on a PC desktop with its introduction of Cloud Desktop earlier this year, Gladinet, the ubiquitous cloud storage client, rolled out Gladinet Cloud Gateway v1.0 and Cloud Desktop v1.3.
The company says both new products are designed to meet the cloud computing needs of small and medium-sized businesses – a category that until now was underserved by cloud service providers.
If Cloud Desktop turns the Internet into a virtual PC, Cloud Gateway is its file server. Built on the same open platform as Cloud Desktop, teh Gateway connects 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."
According to Huang, allowing one server to support many individual desktops, the application gives SMBs the freedom to scale back their own data storage capacity while providing 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,” he said.
Gladinet assures that 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.
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