Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 Enhances Security, Performance, Usability and Google Docs Support

With the release of Cloud Desktop 2.0, Gladinet expects to further establish its industry-leading position as the world's first ubiquitous cloud storage client by enhancing security, usability and performance. Following are some highlights of the new capabilities and enhancements. For more information about Google enhancements, visit ReadWriteWeb's article explaining how to Map GDrive as a Desktop Folder with Gladinet

Enhanced Usability

The new Gladinet Management Console completely reworks and consolidates all the management interfaces for the Cloud Desktop virtual directory manager, task manager, settings manager, backup manager and audit tracing, and the new Cache Manager offers smart caching and granular cache controls.

Here's a screen shot of the new task manager. It gives a brief overview of the progress of all the transfers and backups, with the ability to drill down for more detail.

The new cache manager provides features like the ability to set the cache control mode. There are three modes. 'Low cache usage' and 'Auto optimized' are based on pre-configured settings. 'Advanced Mode' allows the user full freedom to change any cache settings.

When 'Advanced Mode' is selected, you can use the cache usage overview panel or the cache control settings panel to fine tune operation of the cache.

Secure Cloud Storage

Gladinet recognizes that one of the major concerns of cloud storage users is security. How can users be sure that hackers, service provider employees or anyone else can’t look at their files when they’re online? Until now, that was a nagging question with no good answer.

With the introduction of AES 128-bit encryption for files stored in the cloud, Gladinet Cloud Desktop 2.0 is tackling that concern head-on: The system simply encrypts users’ files on the storage client before saving them on the servers in their encrypted form.

Cloud Desktop 2.0- provides a convenient interface to show which directories have been selected for encryption:

Adding a new encrypted folder is also quite user friendly:

The user will also be prompted for a password which will be used to generate a private encryption key.

Faster and More Robust

Cloud Desktop 2.0 is considerably more robust than the system’s earlier iterations, transferring terabytes of data with dozens of upload and download threads, maintaining transfer rates of up to four megabytes per second. To do so, the system uses mirrored folders to pre-cache files and utilizes Smart Bandwidth Control to allocate more bandwidth to the browser when it is in use; once the browser is idle, Cloud Desktop resumes normal transfer speeds.

Note the concurrency and throughput below. This test was running on a machine with a 5MB\s upload speed. Transfer speeds ranged as high as 4MB\s.

Enhanced Cloud Service Integration

Although Gladinet Cloud Desktop has always been fully integrated with the major cloud storage providers -- including Google, Microsoft, EMC, Amazon, Nirvanix, Box.net and AT&T -- with Cloud Desktop 2.0, Gladinet has provided enhancements for Google Picasa, Docs and Apps. The system now supports any file type in Google Storage, while the new Cloud Explorer allows the user to set access controls and share files with Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage. The Cloud Explorer is of particular interest as it provides a platform to further develop finer controls of cloud storage in the future.

For more details about the 2.0 enhancements, check out the Gladinet Wiki and the description of Gladinet Support for Google Storage