Enterprise File Fabric™
With old slow systems, awkward, and dependent on FTP and expensive SaaS services, this Music Production and Distribution company was searching for a better way to collaborate with artists, producers, directors, and other players in the industry that were external to the organization. Here’s how the Enterprise File Fabric stepped up their game.
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ITRI (Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute), is a world-leading applied technology research institute which is also a key player in autonomous vehicle development.
Its technology combines real-time positioning, mapping technology, machine learning, and a range of sensors to simulate driving and capture test data in real world situations. This process generates massive amounts of data that need to be analyzed quickly and precisely, and here is where the the Storage Made Easy (SME) Enterprise File Fabric comes into play.
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This is a follow on from our similar blog post on integrating Slack with the File Fabric.
Microsoft Teams is an alternative to Slack that has gained a lot of traction particularly in the last couple of week because of the need for employees to work from home. We have had several requests of how the File Fabric can be used within Teams and this post outlines how this can be achieved.
Continue reading “Securely working with multi-cloud data in Microsoft Teams using the File Fabric”
by Slack is a cloud-based collaboration tool which many teams and organisations already use as a collaboration hub. The File Fabric is a ‘single pane of glass’ fo unstructured file data, be that on-clodu or on-premises and it makes using, sharing, and accessing these files ultra secure. The File Fabric Slack connector brings together the best collaboration hub with the best File hub !
Continue reading “Share Files Securely Using Slack and the Enterprise File Fabric”
by Hi, I’m James, a Senior Developer at Storage Made Easy. As a developer, I often look for ways to reduce coupling in the tools and technologies that we use, and I see this from the low level code that we write, to the higher-level architectural choices we make.
Continue reading “My Favourite Feature: Cloud S3”
by Total Commander is a popular free file manager for Android phones and tablet devices. It essentially provides an Android version of a desktop File Manager.
Total Commander can be used with Plug-In.’s and these include WebDav, FTP and sFTP plugin’s. The plugin’s add extra functionality to the Total Commander product, enabling it to connect to data using WebDav, FTP and sFTP protocols.
Storage Made Easy provide WebDav, FTP and sFTP protocol adaptors enabling any storage cloud mapped to the SME service to be accessible over these standard protocols, even if the default storage cloud does not support them.
Continue reading “Using Android Total Commander with almost any storage cloud”
by Today we made an update on our FTP and SFTP DNS entries for our US and EU SaaS services.
Personal or Business Cloud customers who have access to SME FTP and SFTP should now use the below to access the FTP and SFTP services:
USA
ftp.storagemadeeasy.com
sftp.storagemadeeasy.com
EU
ftpeu.storagemadeeasy.com
sftpeu.storagemadeeasy.com
by Midnight Commander is probably the most popular command line file manager in the world, and certainly for Linux distros. Its design was initially inspired by the classic two pane interface that was found in Norton Commander which was a DOS file manager (for those who remember !).
One of the unsung features of the Midnight Commander (also available on other platforms including phones (I used to use this on my old Nokia N900) and windows and mac) is that it can connect to server over FTP.
This is interesting from a Storage Made Easy viewpoint as although SME providers a full suite of Linux tools, SME also provider protocol interoperability as part of its Cloud Gateway features. What is this I hear you ask ? Well, simply put, it enables files you have stored on public or private storage to be accessible over any of the protocols Storage Made Easy exposes ie FTP, FTPS, WebDav, S3, SFTP.
Midnight Commander supports the FTP protocol which makes it easy to get direct access to any storage that is added to a SME Account using the SME FTP cloud protocol adaptor. To do this:
Choose the Left or Right option
Choose FTP link
Enter connection to SME as follows:
username:password@storagemadeeasy.com
or if you are using the SME EU Server:
username:password@eu.storagemadeeasy.com
The net result is a very easy way to bring the cloud into the linux desktop integrated with tools you already know and use. This can be used with the SME Personal CLoud plan, Business Team, and on-site enterprise editions of the product.
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Storage Made Easy® have now made live a new SFTP protocol adaptor. SFTP is one of the two primary technologies for secure FTP networking, the other being FTPS, which Storage Made Easy already supports (along with FTP, WebDav, Secure WebDav and S3).
The primary reason we investigated implementing SFTP is due to a government POC in which access was required to secure AWSGov Cloud files from medical terminals. This was the primary requirement, but because Storage Made Easy works with almost any back-end Cloud. once added, it can be used as protocol gateway for any cloud mapped to an account, note that the Port is 2200
Below is an example of using the SFTP protocol to access a Storage Made Easy account using Transmit (a Mac App).
Once connected, all data and mapped clouds are accessible.
Access can also be done directly from the command line.
Once connected we can do an ‘ls’ to get a file listing and the view of the files is similar to our earlier UI view.
To find out more about the SME protocol gateway feature that is part of the File Fabric solution please check out the below video.
SFTP Cloud files Access is available for Files Fabric Enterprise, IaaS, UK Government G-Cloud, or SaaS (business plan only) solutions.
SaaS access to SFTP (for business plan users) can be achieved using the following URL’s:
US
sftp.storagemadeeasy.com
EU
sftpeu.storagemadeeasy.com
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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.
by We have today updated the way in which shared links are managed for all Cloud Files mapped to an account from the web Cloud File Manager. It is now possible to have multiple links for a single file and to easily manage them. These file share links can be either a direct private share, a time expired share or a secure share. Please see the below video for a detailed overview.
by As we recently posted details about our HTML5 client for the BlackBerry Playbook we thought it would be useful to outline how you can sync files from any number of Clouds with your Playbook.
For this walk through we will be using a third party tool for the Playbook called Mobile FTP and the SMEStorage CloudFTP protocol adaptor. This solution will work with any free, personal or business Cloud File Server Account that has the Protocol Adaptor added to their account.
First purchase the Mobile FTP App for your Playbook and install it (t is £1.00)
Next setup the SME CloudFTP protocol adaptor connection in the App. This enables the SMEStorage Clouds you have mapped to your account to be accessible over FTP even if they don’t natively support FTP.
This will result in a new bookmark called SME FTP
At this point all your files are acessible through MobileFTP on the Playbook simply by selecting the bookmark and connecting
You can download files or upload them to the various cloud using the Mobile FTP App
Now we will set up Sync. First we need to create a bookmark of the directory we wish to sync within the Mobile FTP App. We wil choose a folder called ‘Android Docs’ that is hosted on Google Docs.
We will name the Bookmark “Docs to Sync”.
Now we’ll go back to the root of the Mobile FTP and edit the Sync example to change it for sync bookmark we just created:
We changed the name to “SME Sync GDocs” and chose the boomarked directory “Docs to Sync” as the directory to sync with the root of the SD Card. Now we can simply run the sync.
Once the sync is completed the nested directory structure and files are available from the SD card on the Playbook. We can re-run the sync when we wish to pick up any changes, and we can add as many sync profiles, to as many different clouds, as we wish.
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