With free, new, easy-to-use interfaces, access to cloud storage services is as simple as using Windows Explorer.
Because there can be a profound economic benefit, cloud computing is here to stay, and for those of us wishing to extend our little toes into the ethereal blue haze, there may be no better tool to start the flight into the wild blue yonder than CloudBerry Explorer.
A number of public cloud services are available today, including the IBM Cloud, and users will need to determine whether they are ready for a public cloud or they want to split their cloud investment between public and private clouds. Gartner suggests that enterprises do the latter and recommends a ratio of roughly 25 percent of resources devoted to the public cloud and 75 percent to the private cloud.
This allocation seems extremely conservative to us, considering the success stories coming out of public cloud computing. In May, the federal government moved Recovery.gov to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the first use of the cloud by the federal government. The Recovery.gov Web site, which allows citizens to track spending under last year's economic stimulus package, offers arguably non-critical information, but its intent is to provide accountability, and it is a start in the Obama administration's commitment to begin using cloud computing for government services.
While the argument persists that a private cloud is nothing more than what legacy on-premise vendors are offering after leveraging the terminology and benefits of "actual" cloud computing to update their marketing literature—or simple outsourcing—a private cloud represents a change in the relationship between the customer and the provider and suggests users can get IT resources automatically upon request without manual intervention. A key to cloud computing, according to Gartner's Tom Bittman, is an "opaque boundary between the customer and the provider." The core is offering a scalable, IT-enabled capability as a service to customers using Internet technologies.
There is a question of whether offering a private cloud to enterprise users really makes sense economically unless you are doing so for a very large company—say, $1billion or larger. When you figure that you still have to pay for the hardware and software, what's the point? Oh, yes—security. No one really trusts the public cloud yet, and one must get started somewhere. You may wish to take the government's lead and put some non-critical information on the public cloud and see what happens. It would be a terrible thing to see someone walk away with the figures tracking how the government spent the $787 million economic stimulus package, wouldn't it? I jest, of course, but my point is the public cloud is not to be feared; it's to be embraced. Just think of the public cloud as your 15-year-old daughter's new boyfriend. You have to smile and begrudgingly get to know him because he just might be hanging around 20 years from now as her husband.
We'll be looking at the IBM Cloud in a later issue, but for now, think of the three main public cloud services as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and Google Storage ("Windows Azure," by the way, is a complete operating system in the cloud). A number of smaller providers also offer cloud storage services, and many of them use Amazon as their storage repository but provide a front end and billing services. Some of us here at MC Press Online use Jungle Disk, which offers such a complete backup service. Many free interfaces, however, allow you direct access to Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, on which you can create your own low-cost account. One of the best interfaces is CloudBerry Explorer from CloudBerry Lab. There are free versions of the CloudBerry Explorer interface for each of the three main services, which is handy if you want to try out the various features on all of them. Most people just pick one and go for it, and I selected Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) because it was the first on the scene. While Amazon S3 allows for storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 allows for computing in the cloud and is where you can set up a server instance. Amazon has an ever-growing list of cloud applications, including flat as well as relational databases.
Google recently released its new Google Storage for Developers cloud service into general availability, and it has had the advantage of seeing what the other storage services have been offering and then trying to improve upon them. Google also has its own management interface, called Google Storage Manager, that allows you to create and delete "buckets" (the cloud term for folders) and upload and download objects (files). Google Storage for Developers has some advanced security features that should put to rest many of the concerns people have about the public cloud. These include key-based authentication, authenticated downloads from a Web browser, and individual and group-level access controls. So if there are readers who have tried Google Storage for Developers, feel free to post a comment in the MC Press Online forums with your feedback on the service.
CloudBerry Explorer is a more advanced product than many cloud interfaces, and CloudBerry also offers an even more sophisticated version of its interface for about $40, depending on the cloud service. The paid version offers compression, encryption, search, multithreading, FTP support, sync, email technical support, and no expiration (the free version expires every three months). Sounds like a pretty good deal, but if you're going to buy a paid version, you'll want to have decided which of the cloud services you're going with because there's a different CloudBerry Explorer Pro for each one. CloudBerry Explorer Pro for Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, yet another cloud storage provider, is about $10 more, and there is no free CloudBerry interface for this service.
CloudBerry is also working on a white-label version of its CloudBerry Backup product that system integrators and service providers can offer to their clients. This should be available in the third quarter this year.
Getting started with cloud computing can be as easy as opening an account with Amazon (you'll need a credit or debit card) and downloading a free copy of CloudBerry Explorer. However, using cloud services within the enterprise is considerably more complicated and requires a closer look at security and governance, which we will review in a future issue of MC TNT Tips 'n Techniques.
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