Doug On HIPAA

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data. Any company that handles protected health information (PHI) must ensure that strict protocols and protective security measures are adhered to. But maintaining the HIPAA standards of security over electronic information can be difficult especially with outdated storage systems.

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Doug on Data: Delivering the Last Mile of Object Storage to End Users

Object Storage is the way forward for all your storage needs, it’s adaptable meaning it grows with your storage needs, it’s economical, being that you only pay for what you need, but it does also have a number of drawbacks. Object Storage is not easily accessible to end users, and often it lacks auditing controls, which can open your business up to a whole range of problems around security and governance of data.

So what do you do? Struggle on with Block storage that is often increasingly difficult to enlarge when your company grows? Or move to Object storage and struggle to keep control over your data?

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Amazon Cloud Drive no longer accessible

Update Feb 14 2016: Amazon Cloud Drive is now a supported cloud provider for personal cloud users see: https://blog.storagemadeeasy.com/amazon-cloud-drive-is-now-available-to-sme-personal-cloud-users/

Amazon have made some changes on access to their Cloud Drive which means that we will no longer be able to support this as a Cloud Provider as they do not wish external systems to interact with the data contained.

Existing users of this provider are likely to find that they will no longer be able to access their files using this provider. The Amazon Cloud Provider will remain as part of an account until it is removed. It will not be then accessible and it will not be accessible from new accounts from today.

If Amazon change their policy on this then we will re-introduce it.

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Using Zotero with SME and WebDav

Zotero is a firefox plug-in that is an easy to use research tool that aids in gathering, organising, and analysing sources. You can choose to store documents, notes and screenshots that you take directly with Zotero or you can choose to use another WebDav resource.

Of course SMEStorage provides CloudDav, WebDav over any Cloud we support, even if the underlying Cloud does not support WebDav. If you enable CloudDav for your SMEStorage account you can use it with Zotero as follows:

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SME now supports Amazon Cloud Drive

**Please note this is an old post – Amazon Cloud Drive is no longer supported

We’ve now added support for Amazon Cloud Drive as a Cloud Storage Provider that can be used with SMEStorage.

Amazon providers every Amazon customer, even new customers without purchases,  5 Gigabytes of online storage. Customers in the US, who have purchased at least one digital music album on Amazon get, 20 Gigabytes of extra space for the first year. Paid Storage plans start at 20 Gigabytes and go up to 1000 Gigabytes. Each Gigabyte costs $1 per year with no additional costs (ie. no data transfer rates that are normally charged with the use of storage such as Amazon S3).

Let step through adding the Amazon Cloud Drive to your account:

1. First sign up for a new Amazon Account. Even if you have an Amazon Account it can be worth separating your main Amazon account from your Storage Account as Amazon does not provider separate token authentication for Cloud Drive, so the details you use will be the same details you use to login into Amazon, and you may wish to keep these private.

2. Once registered you will be taken to the Cloud Drive home screen, but it is important that you at least attempt to upload a file so that you can agree to the Amazon Terms and Conditions of Cloud Drive (if you are interested, you can review the terms and condition here).

3. Once you have done this your Amazon Cloud Drive will be ready

4. You can now either choose to add the Amazon Cloud Drive to your existing SMEStorage Account (got to My Account->Providers tab and choose “Add new Provider‘ Link) or you can sign up for a new free SMEStorage account. In either case you will need to enter your Amazon Cloud Drive authentication details at the first step of the wizard.

5. After your authentication has been verified you will be required to sync your meta data to create your cloud view within SMEStorage.

6. Once this has completed your CloudDrive files will be mapped and accessible via SMEStorage.

7. If you use the files via our Web Portal then you get all the integrations that are available to all clients such as integration with Zoho office for editing office docs, with Google Viewer for viewing files, ScribD for viewing PDF files, and Picnik for editing images.

8. All other SMEStorage clients will also be able to use with the Amazon Cloud Drive. These include, our Firefox Plug-In, Chrome Extension Plug-In, iPhone/iPad client, Android client, BlackBerry client, Windows Cloud Tools + Virtual Drive, Mac Cloud Tools + virtual Drive, Linux Cloud Tools + Virtual Drive.

Some examples of Clients using the Cloud Drive can be seen below:

iPhone Client

Firefox Client

Mac Client


Free Windows Cloud Explorer

Windows Virtual Drive

UPDATE: This is an old Blog Post – Amazon now prevent access to Cloud Drive and it is no longer supported.

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