On-Premise Gateway to Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is the leading brand in cloud storage. With over 130 Billion objects stored, it is also battle tested to scale.

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It grows and gains trust from businesses around the world looking for offsite storage. If you are one such business, all that you need is an on-premise gateway to Amazon S3.

There are two groups of definition of cloud gateways. Cloud Service Providers tend to define anything that can connect to their service as a gateway, including any desktop client, edge device, appliance and server products. It is kind of like whether it is big airports or small airports, they are all airports for the carriers.

We typically refer to gateway as the central access point that you go out to reach the cloud storage; or in a different sense, the central point brings the cloud storage into your premise. It is like the normal airports we knew as LAX, LGA, MIA and so on.

If you are a sole proprietor or a handful of person team, the best way to use Amazon S3 is to have a desktop client installed on each person’s PC, all connecting directly to S3. One of the choice is to use Gladinet Cloud Desktop, which allows you to setup a network drive and a sync folder to Amazon S3.

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If you have a 10-100 person team, the best way to use Amazon S3 is to have a file server product that connects to S3. So all the 10-100 people can map a network drive to the central file server, while the file server transparently use S3.

This way,  you enjoy LAN performance with add-on cloud storage advantage. In this configuration, you don’t have to give out S3 credentials to users since it is gated at the file server. Instead you use Active Directory to assign permissions.  One of the choice is Gladinet CloudAFS, which allows you to setup a network CIFS share from the file server, with Amazon S3 attached to the share. gca180

The mounting wizard and steps between Cloud Desktop and CloudAFS are exactly the same. The only difference is that one works on your PC and one works on your file server.

 

One of the benefit of using Amazon S3 is that it provides Web Browser interface to your files. Gladinet preserve your local files as objects when they reach Amazon S3. So you can use the S3 web interface to view your files.

You can go to http://aws.amazon.com and log into the web console.

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