Storage Made Easy Blog

We are now giving away 150MB of free WebDav access to mapped Clouds to all SME free accounts. This is enough to access around 300 documents on Mobile devices per month and is enough for the average use of WebDav into Clouds such as DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive etc.

If you want to access more than just pay a one time $5 fee and get access to 2GB per month of WebDav for the life of your use of our service. If you want unlimited use then just sign up to be a personal cloud or business cloud user.

Also, all free accounts feature 5GB free storage on Amazon S3 and the ability to add up to 3 other Clouds that you wish to access.

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Version 1.8 of OpenStack,also known as Grizzly, is now available for use on Linode with the Storage Made Easy Cloud File Server. What we provide is a pre-configured instance of OpenStack Swift in combination with the Storage Made Easy Cloud File Server to enable companies to easily start storing and sharing files on OpenStack. It is also an ideal environment for companies to trial the use of OpenStack and Storage Made Easy as well as for ISP’s to quickly to get to grips with how they could implement OpenStack as a corporate or personal file sharing and collaboration platform.

Storage Made Easy has been a member of the OpenStack foundation since the very early days of launch and we continue to provide support and compatibility with OpenStack Swift releases.

If you are interested in a pre-configured hosted version of OpenStack Swift in combination with the features that SME provides then please contact us.

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The upstream traffic link is currently having problems and causing issues with access to our US Site. We’ll advise when resolved.

The issue now seems resolved – seems it was a massive upstream DDOS attack.

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File Sharing is a key part of a companies ability to collaborate and share corporate data, which increasingly can be stored in many disparate services. The purpose of this post is to offer suggestion businesses should consider for their corporate file sharing strategy:

Many business just let employees share files with no control and no checks. This needs a policy. This is the businesses core asset and it needs to be protected and secure. Also, compliance and legislation of data is increasingly becoming important. The business needs to ensure it does not get caught in a compliance trap.

Point 1: Implement a control mechanism for your users. For example Storage Made Easy enables users to share files using links that can be password protected and in which the link can be set to expire. This protects against the user forwarding file. The file link can be set to expire on first download for example or set to download after 24 hours (or any other specified time period). If the file is password protected, even if the file is forwarded by the recipient then the file cannot be accessed unless the password is provided. A control mechanism promotes best practice security management of files and reduces operational risk.

Point 2: Point Solution or not ? Consider whether your strategy should be a point solution or whether it works with your existing data sets. Many vendors may purport to promote managed secure file sharing but often you find you have to move your data to their Cloud to have the solution work for you. Storage Made Easy works with private on-premise data, public cloud data such as DropBox, SkyDrive, Box etc and also with SaaS services such as BaseCamp. This promotes a ‘joined up’ strategy for company file sharing.

Point 3: Integrates with what you have ? Consider whether the solution works how you work so that it does not get in the way of business or productivity. For example Storage Made Easy integrates directly in the desktop as a network drive with simple right click options to share files. This behaviour supports Windows, Mac and Linux.  Also integration has been done with other core business productivity tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Mac Mail to promote easy secure file sharing using links directly from the corporate mail client. Similar integrations exists for core productivity tools such as Microsoft Office and Open Office or Libre Office.

Point 4: Compliance, Compliance Compliance – Compliance is fast catching up with all verticals when it comes to storing and accessing corporate files off site. There is specific industry legislation related to this, such as HIPPA in healthcare and FERPA in education, but  there are various legislation proposals being processed at various levels in the USA and EU and it is a safe bet that  the ability to track historic file events will become more of a requirement not less of a one. Also for companies, the ability to search against historic file sharing or data access should be just part of an overall joined up corporate security policy.

Point 5: On-Premise, Hybrid or Cloud ? The last point is to do with implementation. You should be able to decide how you manage data or metadata associated with storing files and sharing files. This can be behind the corporate firewall, totally on Cloud., or some combination of both. The key word here is choice.

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Similar to our Chrome File Explorer extension we blogged about recently, we have now released the same extension for Safari.

You can install it from the SME Clients and Tools page.

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BoxCryptor provides a virtual hard disk that encrypts files within a storage account using using 256-bit AES encryption. BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, not an entire volume or container.

BoxCryptor encrypts and decrypts files locally, and it doesn’t transmit passwords to third parties. As a result files remain unreadable to outsiders even if hackers manage to steal passwords as they need to also break the file encryption.

How is this different to SME provided encryption? SME provides streamed encryption which occurs over the https protocol. Users choose a private key to encrypt files on upload to their underlying cloud and SME does not store this key on the SME platform.

Like BoxCryptor Storage Made Easy also uses AES-256 encryption. We use the Rijndael cipher, with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) where the block size is 16 bytes..

Storage Made Easy also provides a file decryption tool that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux for local decryption of files downloaded direct from a Storage provider rather than via SME tool or client.

BoxCryptor recently updated their iOS App and although the App supports several storage clouds, as SME supports 35+ storage clouds and provides access into them using WebDav, BoxCryptor can be used in conjunction with SME to create and access encrypted folders with files  on any cloud SME supports.

The pictorial walkthrough below shows how to achieve this.

BoxCryptor also supports Mac and Windows and can be used with SME Webdav or the Cloud Drive Apps. There is also a BoxCryptor Android App which can also similarly used with SME WebDav.

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We’ve added a new Storage Made Easy Chrome extension to the Chrome Web Store. The sole function of this extension is to enable auto-login and launch of the SME Web File Manager for quick access.

The SME Web File Manager is a hierarchical file manager which makes it ideal to deal with large data set and also data from different on-premise or public cloud storage, which are unified in the file tree. A Storage Made Easy Account is needed but a free account can be signed up directly from the extension.

The reason for this extension was to make it a lot easier for users to be able to gain access to the Web Cloud File Manager for one of our business customers who had equipped their salesforce with Chromebook Pixel’s.

The Web File Manager enabled them to have a workflow which included editing and commenting of documents directly from the Chromebook on various clouds that they used which includes BaseCamp and Amazon S3.

The extension can also be used for securely sharing files which include setting passwords on files and/or time expiry.

The web file manager, from a single user perspective provides a very nice way to work with data between cloud providers and even collaborate with other people using Business Group WorkSpaces. For business users it provides a complete collaboration environment between user which includes files editing, file commenting, file versioning and file locking.

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We had an interesting Use Case recently in which the requirements were as follows:

The Company in question had a Google Apps Account and therefore used Google Drive for their Storage. They had a number of iWork Numbers documents that were modified by their team members whilst on the move using iWork and iPad’s. Currently their process was editing the files, and then trying to send the resultant file via email to other team members. Due to file size some files were not received and in general the email server was quickly eating up storage. What they cam to SME for was to figure out how they could refine this process.

With Storage Made Easy the process became much simpler. Firstly the company subscribed to a Cloud File Server SaaS Account. The SME Cloud Admin then added the companies Google Drive account to be accessible via SME and invited other team members to be part of the Cloud File Server. On the Folder(s) in question the Cloud Admin simply set permissions so that relevant team members had access and added a notification rule specific to keynote file to ensure that all subscribers to the shared folder received an email notification on new files or updates to existing files. As per our prior article on Twitter and SMS Gateways on these changes to file events SME can easily generate instant SMS notifications.

As Storage Made Easy enables WebDav above any Cloud added to it then Google Drive becomes instantly accessible via WebDav. For the Company this means that they can simply open and create new keynote files directly in Keynote from their shared Google Drive folder and then on completion simply save them back. The very act of doing this generates a file event on completion which send an email and/or SMS to users subscribed to the shared folder vastly simplifying the process.

Another added benefit to the company is the complete end-to-end joined up audit tracking they get on all Google Drive documents:

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One of the benefits of Twitter it it’s ability to generate events on messages and even more it’s ability to tie this to push, email and especially SMS notifications. In many ways you can craft solutions to use it as an SMS Gateway, and indeed there are a few innovative solutions that do just this.

We have implemented such a solution for event notifications with the SME Open Cloud File Server which unifies files from over 35 different public Storage Clouds and private on-premise files, whilst also providing security and audit services. In this post I’m going to step you through how the SME Twitter integration works.

All accounts, including the free accounts have the ability to use Twitter as an event notification for file share or file event notifications. The first step to using Twitter as an event notification system is to sign up for a Twitter Account and then integrate it with your SME Account. To integrate with SMEStorage take the following steps:

1. After login go to App integrations from the right sidebar.

2. Choose to sign in with Twitter using OAuth in which you enable interaction with your Twitter account without exposing your password:

3. Enter your Twitter username and password when Twitter pops the authenticate and allow access page.

4. Once this is done you will be returned to the SME site and you can choose how you wish to use Twitter with Storage Made Easy:

You can choose to use Twitter to share files and also for notifications.

Now before we show you how to use Twitter with Storage Made Easy, if you want to receive Twitter push notifications to your phone or messages as SMS, you need to map your cell phone to Twitter. To do this you need to login to you Twitter account and then click on the link that enables you to setup Twitter with our mobile phone:

This will take you to a page where you can enter your cell number and setup Twitter to work with your cell / mobile.

Once this is done you are all set, now we can explore how you can take advantage of the Twitter integration with Storage Made Easy:

The first way is that you can share file links directly on you Twitter account (be sure not to share copyrighted files as complaints can lead to account closure). You can do this from the website or client / mobile tools:

Now that Twitter is setup you will also receive notifications if a user shares a file with you from a business workspace or from a shared business folder. This gets sent as a Twitter direct message and therefore generates an SMS to your mobile device.

The other cool Twitter integration that Storage Made Easy provides is the ability to configure an email address which can be used to accept emails from nominated addresses. (to get access to this feature you have to add Twitter Notifications for emails from Cloud Apps after login to the SME website).

When those emails are received to the email configured from the nominated senders a Twitter Direct Message email is sent to the Twitter Account you integrated with SME. This DM contains who the email was from, and the subject line, and of course if you have Twitter setup with your cellphone as described above you will also get a realtime SMS alert when this is triggered.

What is this good for ? Well for file sharing, you get instantaneous notifications delivered over SMS. Also, if you have inbound emails that you want absolutely instant SMS notifications from then this works a treat as almost instantaneously as the email comes in you will get an SMS notification letting you know, so it is great for systems or Apps that generate real-time email alerts but have no SMS capability. Alternatively perhaps you configured the email to be a CC on some urgent email you want to receive. The possibilities for use are endless.

Storage Made Easy can also offer business customers of our Cloud File Server integrations with other SMS Gateways such as Twilio, Clikatell and BulkSMS.

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One of the legal companies that use the Storage Made Easy on-premise Cloud File Server Appliance had a recent request that we felt was worth exposing as we can see it could be a common use case.

The company has legal and para-legal resources that had the need to be able to annotate PDF’s whilst away from the office using their iPad’s.  The legal data is stored on an EU Amazon S3 instance  and the SME Cloud File Server Appliance is used to provide  single sign on with the internal Active Directory Server whilst also providing granular permissions and auditing services for full document tracking.

A key point for the company was that any PDF document editing would be able to be done on the move from an iPad, saved back to the S3 Cloud from the iPad, and also that any changes were audit trackable. and users were instantly notified of changes. The SME Cloud on-premise Cloud Appliance, which unifies public and private data sources, as well as providing a full audit trail for all file interactions was used to satisfy this requirement in the following way:

- SME Cloud Appliance was already installed on-premise behind the corporate firewall

- The companies own EU S3 Account had been added as a Cloud to be monitored from the Appliance

- Auditing of any file events was set

- Access to the S3 files was available via the WebDav protocol using the users Active Directory username / password as Active Directory SSO was enabled via the Appliance

- As S3 files were available via WebDav the iAnnotate iPad App could be used to login and annotate files as outlined below.

Setting up access to Storage Made Easy from the cloud appliance is done as follows:

1. First setup a new WebDav cloud connection

2. Enter the SME WebDav Details

3. Connect

4. After Annotating the document then simply save it.

5. On completion the annotated document is saved back to Amazon S3 (or any other WebDav Cloud it was access from).

All interactions that occur are also fully audited with the remote IP Address, username, and document details and these are available as part of the Audit logs provided by the SME Appliance that can be exported as a .cvs or excel and / or can be archived.

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