Android – Page 2 – Storage Made Easy Blog

May 15, 2012

Rich Client enabling HP Object Cloud Storage

SMEStorage Cloud File Server now supports HP Object Storage which is in public beta. You can sign up for HP Object Storage from HP Cloud Services here.

To add HP Object Storage to your account after sign up please take the following steps:

Navigate to your DashBoard and choose to add a new Cloud Provider and choose the HP Cloud:

Next follow the wizard to enter the correct information:

When you are authenticated, if there are existing buckets then you can choose to index them to make them available via the SME Cloud File Server and/or you can create a new bucket name:

Next your can choose to sync or index your data. All this does is find out information about your data such as filename, date, size etc.

Once done your data is available to work with through the web rich client as well as other mobile and desktop tools:

In a future blog article we will look at how you can use HP Cloud Storage to implement a full fledged multi-tenant Cloud File Server in which you can assign user permissions and governance controls to data.

March 11, 2012

Encrypting Cloud Files on Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and iPad / iPhone

One of the issues that becomes apparent with more users choosing to work from mobile phones and tablets is the issue of security. Sometimes these devices can end up in the wrong hands and when that happens it is reasonable to take precautions about how can open and gain access to files you have stored in the Cloud.

The secondary security concern can be with Cloud the Providers themselves. Users often want to protect certain files on the actual Cloud where they reside, and to that end they can want to use encryption independent of the Cloud Provider.

This particular use case can be solved by using the Cloud encryption service that SMEStorage provides. This features is provided to free, personal, and Cloud File Server users.

Encryption works when users upload files from SMEStorage web or desktop access Client, to any of the 35 Cloud Storage and Saas Providers that SMEStorage supports. Users connect over SSL and assign files a key phrase to file that are uploaded. This key phrase is not stored anywhere on the SME service, and files are encrypted as they stream through the SME service to the remote Cloud Provider.

When web, windows / Mac / Linux, or iOS, Android, WP7 or BlackBerry mobile clients are used to try and access an encrypted file then a password prompt will be presented and the file will be unable to be accessed until this key phrase is entered. If the files is share using a file share link then anyone who then tries to open the file will also be required to enter the key phrase before accessing the file.

SMEStorage uses AES-256 encryption using the Rijndael cipher, with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) where the block size is 16 bytes. The cipher Rijndael consists of:

– an initial Round Key addition
– Nr-1Rounds
– a final round.

The chaining variable goes into the “input” and the message block goes into the “Cipher Key. The likelihood of recovering a file that has been encrypted using our encryption is fairly remote. The most efficient key-recovery attack for Rijndael is exhaustive key search. The expected effort of exhaustive key search depends on the length of the Cipher Key and for a 16-byte key, 2 to the power of 127 applications of Rijndael.

Any AES-256 decryption tool that supports the Rijndael cipher with 16 byte blocksizes can be used to un-encrypt files. For example the popular freeware file manager Total Commander has a free plugin to handle such decryption.

December 30, 2011

Cloud federation and governance will dominate in 2012

It’s seasonally topical to write a blog post that will draw a close to the old year with some predictions for the New Year, so read on for a post that fits with that trend…

2011 has been an eventful year for SMEStorage. On the business side we have always been a privately owned self funded company. We have never been VC backed and we’re profitable and have needed to be to be self sufficient. To enable us to expand the founders took a decision to raise some money to enable the company to continue to grow and expand the company. To this end Vehera, the owning entity of SMEStorage sold a small amount of equity enabling Vehera to raise a million dollars to fund the companies push for 2012. This will give the ability to add some more staff to enable us to grow the opportunity we see for our technology with ISP’s and the Enterprise.

On the Technology front we continued building out our support for Cloud’s resulting in SMEStorage now supporting over 35 Storage and SaaS Clouds. We also released a native Windows Phone Client,and also the first versions of Mac and Linux Cloud Tools and we enhanced our native browser plug in’s with support for Google Chrome and Safari. We also enhanced our iOS App for iPhone and iPad many times over the course of the year as well as releasing a native Android client for Phones and tablets. In addition to all of this we also improved our core offering with a myriad of new features which included adding protocol adaptors that exposed Clouds mapped to SMEStorage over WebDav, FTP or the Amazon S3 API, even if the underlying Cloud does not natively support these protocols.

So what for 2012, well, firstly we’ll continue to add more services that can be federated and managed. Shortly we’ll be announcing support for SugarSync, and the UbuntuOne Cloud. We’ll also be adding services less traditionally associated with file stores. The first of these will be BaseCamp, which will be followed by some CRM SaaS services and we have in mind another project / collaboration SaaS tool.

We’ll also be adding even more Cloud governance and e-compliance features. If your interested on our take on Cloud Sprawl and governance please see our prior blog post on this subject.

We intend to push out our revised Cloud Appliance in early 2012. This will give any customer the ability to have a hybrid Cloud governance application that deals with Cloud and local data and service federation that they fully control and own. Customers will be able to host this in their own data centre as it will be available as a VMWare, XEN or KVM appliance. As an alternative we intend to enable easy access to an Amazon EC2 based instance. We also intend to make it easy for resellers to get their ands on it and offer it as a value add to their own business.

It’s our firm belief that with the greater adoption of Cloud, and the increasing array of Cloud Services that 2012 will be the year of Cloud Federation and governance as companies struggle to manage and control the Cloud services deployed in their organisation. We believe that with our advanced service features, comprehensive access clients, and Hybrid on-premise Cloud Appliance that we are well placed to help companies who struggle with these issues.

For general predictions, we’ll make just one, and that is that the “free lunch” is coming to an end. In a volatile economy services that offer “free” may look appealing, but all businesses need to make money to survive and free eventually needs to become paid, and companies need a solid business model to survive. Hoping to capitalise at some point on a large user base of free users is not a business plan. There is room for some element of freemium, we use it ourselves, but our belief is that it has to be underpinned by a solid business plan. If you’d like to read more about this, see this post which goes into a little more depth.

All that remains to be said is to wish you all a “Happy New Year” and we hope all your hopes and dreams are realised in the forthcoming year.

December 18, 2011

Bring your own Device is changing Enterprise IT

In the not to distant past most companies had a unilateral policy on cell phones. You were given one by the company and it was a BlackBerry, or it was a Windows Mobile etc, and there was a mandate that you had to use it. The company provided it, you used it, and more often than not you walked around with another personal phone that you actually wanted to own and use.

Today, more and more companies are adopting a BYOD or ‘bring your own device’ approach. The Apple iPad was pinpointed, by research Forrester did on the subject, as what started to consolidate the shift that was preceded by the iPhone, as company executives brought it with them to the office and challenged IT to support it.

Far from IT departments having the ability to strictly dictate the mobile of their ecosystems, they are being challenged by personal smartphone preference. The Forrester report cites 59 percent of companies that were surveyed enabled employees to bring their own phones to work.

Another factor is the rise in remote or on-the-move working. Whereas in the past company workers had found themselves logging onto the corporate VPN from a laptop or PC, many companies use Google Docs or Hosted SharePoint making access easier to “just connect” using web security protocols such as OAuth. Many analysts and government bodies are predicting this as being the future of IT.

We’ve long been an advocate of this ‘martini’ anytime/anywhere type policy of working with data from mobile devices. It’s the future, plain and simple. This is why we very early built out a comprehensive mobile strategy that focused on supporting all the major mobile devices ie. iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

It’s also the reason why we’ve concentrated on providing governance and e-compliance features that work against what we believe will become the real challenge of corporate IT, that of the sprawl of public and private Cloud Services.

We will continue to focus on this throughout 2012 and broaden not only our supported data cloud offerings but we will also also release support for other SaaS services, some of which are in beta now with some of our customers.

We will continue to expand governance options and integration with Corporate IT, and best of all if you want to host all this in your own data centre, you can using our Cloud Appliance which supports VMware, XEN, and KVM environments.

We believe 2012 will be looked back on as the year that two key themes converged in corporate IT, that of mobile working and Cloud Computing, and we are looking forward to working with existing and new customers to support it.

October 5, 2011January 23, 2012

Cloud Computing Use Case: Sharing PDF’s stored on SkyDrive with an “on the road” team using Galaxy Tab and iPad’s

Given the propensity for so many different use cases that using the Cloud with Files can come up with we thought we’d start sharing some of the day-to-day use cases we deal with here on our blog.

This one is an inbound request in which a business has a series of PDF’s stored in a folder hierarchy on SkyDrive that they need to share with a distributed team that uses a combination of Galaxy Tab and iPad’s. The files need to be synchronised for offline use and the files can be updated each evening so the remote people need to be able to resync the files locally to get the latest versions for offline use.

Firstly lets address SlyDrive. In this event all the business needs to is to start using our Cloud File Server and add the SkyDrive Cloud to their account from the Cloud DashBoard. This starts a wizard in which the user is stepped through adding the SkyDrive Cloud.

Once this is done the Business Admin of the Cloud File Server needs to convert the folder containing the PDF’s into a shared Organization Folder. This means that any users that are added to the Cloud File Server will be able to see this folder.

The Business Cloud Admin can now choose to set the types of permissions that they wish to set on the folder (read only, etc).

Once this is done The Cloud Admin can add the users:

Now this is setup lets move to the tablet side. We’ll take the iPad first:

IPAD:

Each of the users that the Cloud File Server Admin added to the Cloud File Server can access their account using the iSMEStorage iPad App. once logged in they will be able to view files on the Cloud in a unique Cloud Files view.

However as per the business requirements we need to be able to sync the folder that was shared containing PDF’s down to the device. To do this the user needs to visit that particular folder in the Cloud File Manager and nominate the folder for local sync.

Once this is done the user can go to ‘My Syncs’ from the menu and action a sync which will download all the PDF’s locally. In future as the documents are updated overnight he just needs to visit My Syncs again and choose to resync which will download the newest files.

Galaxy Tab:

As with the iPad the user needs to visit the PDF directory from the Cloud Files view and nominate the PDF folder for Sync in the SMEStorage Android App.

Once this is done the user can return to My syncs, click on the directory and choose to sync. This will download the relevant PDF’s to the iPad. Again a sync can be done each day to update the latest files.

As there is less restriction on Android devices users can set the App to do a scheduled sync daily. Unfortunately this is not currently possible on the iPad.

August 1, 2011

Alfresco, OpenS3 and Office365 Clouds added to SMEStorage

We’ve added support for three new clouds to the SMEStorage Open Cloud Platform. These are:

Office365: Office 365 includes the Microsoft Office suite of desktop applications and hosted versions of Microsoft’s Server products (including Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync Server), delivered and accessed over the Internet.

Alfresco: Alfresco is a general purpose content repository with content management services.

Open S3: Support for S3 compatible Clouds in which you can specify you own endpoint, such as Eucalyptus.

All Clouds are available to free and business accounts and Clouds are accessible from Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 Clients.

July 23, 2011July 23, 2011

Office 365

We’ve had a quite a few requests now for SMEStorage to offer integration with Office 365, Microsoft’s online offering for small businesses. We’re doing some analysis to see whether we can add connection to Office 365 so that users can work with data from iOS, Android, and BlackBerry (with Windows Phone coming soon), as well as, of course, Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Office 365 has built in access to files folders via integrated SharePoint capability and unfortunately the SharePoint in 365 does not seem to have any means to connect via WebDav for users.

We’ll post an update when we have more news on our work to add Office 365 integration.

June 11, 2011June 11, 2011

Android SMECloud File Manager update to version 2.1

We’ve updated our Android App to version 2.1 The 2.1 update is a substantial update that beefs up the features for local transfer of files from PC’s and laptops. Now users can transfer files directly from their PC over WiFi using FTP clients or a browser. This makes very easy to take files with you that you have stored locally.

The update also adds a scheduler for automation of the synchronisation of files to/from the device and one or more storage clouds. This was a must requested feature from users so we’ve managed to get it into this build.

The third major part of the update is better integration with the Android Operating System so that all upload, download, and file event notifications are visible in the Android notification taskbar.

The tighter integration with the Android OS means that you can now take advantage of SMEStorage Cloud File Manager from many other applications. This is one of the particular strengths of the Android, as is the great notification features, and we are pleased to now be taking fill advantage of these.

This tighter integration means that all downloads and uploads are now processes as tasks that show up in the Android notification bar and the users do not need to stay in the Application for the uploads or downloads to complete

SMEStorage is available from the Google Android Marketplace at:

https://market.android.com/details?id=ta.smestorageg

May 6, 2011November 2, 2012

OpenStack now supported for SME Open Cloud SaaS Platform and Cloud Appliance

We are really pleased to announce that we have added OpenStack Swift object Storage support to the SME Open Cloud Platform. Swift is a sub project of OpenStack and provides a highly scalable redundant unstructured data store. Swift is 5 separate services, object, container, account, auth and proxy. Although each of these can be scaled separately, in practice they run together.

Never heard of Swift? it’s the underlying distributable object store that supports RackSpace Cloud Files. It’s akin to Amazon’s S3 implementation but unlike implementations such as Eucalyptus, which clone S3 API’s, but are not sponsored by Amazon, openStack and Swift has RackSpace firmly onboard, and have proven scale.

As Swift is used by Rackspace Cloud Files. Swift RackSpace claim it is production-ready code that is scalable to massive levels (100-petabyte clusters and 100000 requests per second). Swift sacrifices C for A and P from a CAP theorem perspective. Although most operations happen synchronously consistency is sacrificed in failure scenarios.

From our perspective we have seen ISP’s and larger SMB users of our on-premise Cloud Gateway appliance expressing interest in SME supporting this, and we supply this as VMWARE Appliance (OR XEN, KVM) or as a dedicated hardware appliance for smaller companies who wish to embrace their own private Cloud infrastructure.

As with our S3 API endpoint support SME will overlay a more traditional file store on top of Swift layered with the business functionality we provide in our Cloud File Server, which includes virtual drives and clients for Mac, Windows and Linux, and feature rich mobile clients for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, as well as value added features to Swift such as Webdav and FTP support.

Setting up Swift with SME is easy. First you need to add a new Cloud Provider and then the Cloud Wizard will be invoked. The first step is to enter your OpenStack details:

When entering the endpoint URL you should be sure to include the Port. An example URL is: http://<IP Address>:11000/v1.0.

Next you will need to choose which containers you want to work with and which should be the default container for any uploads to smart folders.

Once you have done this you will be ready to start the meta-sync which pulls in and caches all the information about containers and files.

If you have any issues connecting please refer to this advanced post on using SME with OpenStack 1.60 and SWAuth.

Once complete you will be able to access/amange your OpenStack files from the SME Web clients, as well as using a Cloud Drive on Windows, Mac or Linux, and mobile clients for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry, and the plethora of other tools and clients that SME provides. We’v e posted some screenshots below of this.

Web File Manager

iOS OpenStack

Android OpenStack

Firefox Plug-In OpenStack

Chrome OpenStack Plug-In

Mac Cloud Drive OpenStack

The OpenStack Swift API’s also get embedded for use within our own feature rich multi-cloud API framework in which we add many business driven features.. You can find details about that on our developer page

April 11, 2011April 18, 2020

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.

February 21, 2011October 11, 2012

Android SME Cloud File Manager updated to 1.7

We have updated our Android SMEStorage Cloud File Manager on the Google Android Marketplace to version 1.7. This new release has the following changes:
– Enabled Notes to be emailed as attachments
– Accessing notes changed to a double tap
– Added support for HTTPS on login (https is slower)
– Added support to upload any file from phone to storage cloud chosen
– Added support for icloud, safesync & Sharepoint clouds. SharePoint can only be used by SMEStorage business accounts.

The next release will feature HTTP / FTP support for local file upload over Wi Fi and also sync from ‘cloud to phone’ / ‘phone to cloud’ scheduling, a much requested feature.