Today we are introducing a new, much requested, feature that can securely allow anyone to upload files to a folder in OpenStack, Google Nearline, Amazon S3, Azure and any of the other Cloud Storage services that Storage Made Easy supports.
One of the drawbacks of most cloud storage services is that they do not allow anyone but an authenticated user to upload files to a users account.
For example as a company you may want to invite a partner or associate to upload documents to a folder stored in OpenStack or some other Cloud Storage service such as Amazon S3 or Google Nearline. The problem is that to achieve this it is needed to know the Cloud Service’s account’s username and password.
The new Drop Folder feature feature from Storage Made Easy solves this.
Lets take a look at how this works
First let us select a Windows Azure Folder, called ‘Project Folder’, that we want to expose to an external party to enable them to upload a file(s).
Once we have the sharing dialogue we can choose the Drop Folder feature and set an access password. Note that if you wish you can prevent the external party viewing any files that may be stored in that folder.
Once you hit the “Generate a new link’ button a unique private URL is generated. This URL is not indexable by Google or other search engines unless it is publicly shared in some way.
You can share this URL with the external party whom you wish to upload files , and you will also need to share the password you set, preferably by a separate means, for security purposes.
Now lets switch to what the external party sees when they receive that URL and click on it:
The user needs to enter the password you set, and shared, to be able to access it.
At this point files can be uploaded:
The uploaded files are added to the Cloud, in this case Azure, and visible from the SME File Manager from the user(s) who has access to the folder that was shared.
This feature is available now on the SME SaaS hosted service for Personal and Business Cloud users. It will be available in the forthcoming version of the SME Appliance and will also be able to be used with on-premise storage and CIFS folders shares.
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