(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After the introducing its Cloud Desktop product earlier this year, desktop-based cloud services developer Gladinet (www.gladinet.com) has launched Gladinet Cloud Gateway v1.0, which connects individual desktops to cloud storage through a single access point, and allows one server to support many individual desktops.
According to its Wednesday announcement, Cloud Gateway acts as a virtual file server for Cloud Desktops. Built on the same scalable open platform as Cloud Desktop, Cloud Gateway lets small and medium-sized businesses scale back their own data storage capacity, while providing reliable, centralized administration and backup capability.
“Cloud Gateway acts as a liaison between Cloud Desktop and cloud storage,” Gladinet co-founder Jerry Huang said in a statement. “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.”
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.
“We realized that in terms of cloud storage and the centralization of cloud services from a variety of providers, SMBs were being overlooked by most providers,” Huang said. “But SMBs are the ones who can benefit the most from the time- and cost-saving features of services like Cloud Desktop and Cloud Gateway. For that reason, Gladinet chose to focus on developing a business suite that meets the needs of SMBs and can be scaled to support organizations of just about any size — not just the big dogs.”
