Cloud Madness or Cloud Managed
There are a multitude of cloud infrastructure services out there today boasting of varying levels of storage services and freebie options. But it’s essential that before taking that leap into Cloud personal storage you have weighed the pros and cons pretty well. For those using Cloud storage for personal and mobile reasons, begin to take note off some essentials. It’s appetizing when you hear and read of large storage blocks being advertised by cloud storage providers, e.g. Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc who lure us to use their platforms and apps in order to create relationship for other products and services.
For those yet to sign on to any cloud storage you’re roaming the web looking for online storage freebies too. You may already have in fact an array of them to trump up your smartness. Your pictures are on Google Drive, Box for your online documents, OneDrive perhaps with some exchange documents and you’re perhaps using a manufactures bundled storage service, e.g. HTC so perhaps you’re signing on with Dropbox etc. If you’re like me, you may even go for the 10Tb offered by Baidu and it’s now getting rather excruciating trying to manage all your content. Basically you’re a maestro for free stuff and it’s beginning to take a toll on you managing your files, apps services and backups, pictures and data spread across multiple providers. This can leave you quite exposed and could impact on your digital-life negatively.
The option available to you, if you’re anywhere mimicking the above scenarios is to consolidate all your online data storage services into one provider. But there is a problem, I know, your preference may be one services over the other and given that you may be using a smart device that comes preconfigured to work with a particular storage provider you are left with a bit of a no-choice situation. Well, that’s “yesterday”, there are ways now! Most scenarios and options have been predominantly commercial. But the key point is to begin the process of consolidating your freebies so you can manage your data from one portal. Cloud consolidation services offer sign-up fees to help you tie all these different Cloud providers into their portal. Speaking on free, there is also a free platform now offering full cloud storage consolidation that can add on to your freebie quest too.
I stumbled on this service after a rather cumbersome evening trying to close one storage service account by migrating my data to another. The cumbersomeness in pulling 8gb over the Internet to your PC and then having to find somewhere else to dump it securely can be quite a handful of steps. If I need to do it the traditional way, i must first download to my PC and then upload to another service, that will mean subject to stable Internet connection, having to verify each time that the data moved indeed is not corrupt and then ddoa checksum to ensure iin between source and destination no malicious act on the files happened. Apart from the extensive bandwidth required, the process is resource consuming and almost the key bait all Cloud storage providers bank on – than once you have your data on their platforms, you essentially are somewhat locked-in. Well no more! I signed on to https://www.multcloud.com, as i said it’s free, and with a simple registration process am ready to go. The portal allows me to attach all my freeby storage services to the control center and then presto, I was easily moving files from one Cloud storage provider to the other. Alas, now i can consolidate without being really in the “middle”.
So what were the essential reasons for choice of MultCloud anyway…
1. 256-bit encryption is applied on data transmission. [Yet to be verified as de facto]
2. The authorization system of MultCloud is based on OAuth, which is a standard authorization framework that enables third party applications to build up a connection to cloud services without username and password required.
3. Data and files are not saved on MultCloud servers.
It is a promising platform with comparable features to the premium solutions out there. I see MultCloud as an upcoming Cloud storage management platform with a different approach. Mutli-cloud storage management is a virgin territory that will become mainstream in the near future as move to Cloud OS becomes more mainstream and OS based policies become user-controllable so that for instance you can encrypt your data and split them across multiple storage service in order to improve data security, or to have a certain type of content linked to a particular storage provider with the ability to manage all your cloud services from one one app.
The business model for MultCloud is surely the next potential security question, the service currently is branded as totally free and indeed it seems. I will dig into it to understand what will keep the investment running in a different post. But key to this blog is that the options are now becoming available. It’s the right time to begin thinking of consolidating your personal storage services in order to have better control of your data. Don’t wait for your freebie storage provider to change their Terms and Conditions before your start seeking ways out. Take control now and avoid the painful future of managing different services. Start by consolidating into one management service now. Data is your asset, and to have control over your assets is clearly an essential part of assessing your exposure. Whether charged or free, sign on to a Cloud storage management platform to have richer control over your data and information assets.
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