Items tagged with Cloud Storage
Cloud-based additions to mobile apps have become commonplace, but they are not always the best thing for consumers or developers. According to new research, by either misconfiguration or simple lack of security best practices, some mobile app developers have left the personal data of over 100 million people at risk. Cyber threat intelligence company Check Point Research (hereafter CPR) recently discovered that many application developers put user data at risk by not following best practices when “configuring and integrating 3rd party cloud services into applications.” This vulnerable data could include both the developers’ as well as the consumers’ information, which is...
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Just about everyone stores at least some of their personal data in the cloud today. That might be documents you want to access from anywhere, photos you want to protect, or other content you don't want to save locally. Google has announced that it will be offering the revamped Google Drive service known as Google One to everyone around the world. We first talked about Google One in May when it was first announced. The name change wraps in everything that was Google Drive before and adds in some new benefits like more storage for the same money, family sharing capability, and reduced-price bookings at hotels via Google Search. That last benefit is an odd one, but with so many people booking hotels...
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Dropbox will now meld with the Google Cloud, bringing users "one step closer to a world where our work comes together." Dropbox says that it will soon start to roll out a series of integrations that aim to make it easier to use its cloud storage service more effectively with Google productivity and collaboration tools. These integrations will include centralized content, which means that Dropbox users will be able to open, edit, save, share, and create Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Users will also be able to directly save content from Google's office applications to their Dropbox account. Dropbox Business admins will be able to manage Docs, Sheets, and Slide just as they can with any...
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In April 2013, cloud storage provider Backblaze kicked off what would immediately become a tradition. Each year, the company analyzes an incredible amount of data collected over the course of the year to give the rest of us an impression on which hard drive vendors come out ahead, and which fall behind. In other words, it's a polite way of analyzing which vendor "is more likely to lose your data". In Q4 of last year, Backblaze had 91,243 hard drives in operation, a number which excludes boot drives and a few others that couldn't meet the company's criteria of having at least 45 drives of one model in use during the period monitored (to give more accuracy to the results). As seen in the table...
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You guys just had to go and ruin it for all of us, didn’t you!? Microsoft has announced a wide-scale reshuffling of its OneDrive cloud storage tiers and the changes aren’t pretty at all. The first major casualty is unlimited storage, which is being nixed for Office 365 Home, Personal and University subscribers. The unlimited option was originally introduced over year ago, with Microsoft stating that it was “just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations.” Well,...
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Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has shown a surprising amount of “love” for its competitors. It has provided high-functioning Office apps to iOS and Android users well ahead of solutions for its own Windows Phone platform. It has even partnered with Dropbox, which goes head-to-head with Microsoft’s own OneDrive online cloud storage solution. Today, Microsoft has even more love to share, as it is taking steps to offer more robust cloud storage integration into its Office apps. That starts today with the addition of updated iOS Office apps that allow users to “open, edit and save documents from these [third-party cloud storage providers] right from within Office.” That means that iOS users can...
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While it’s not quite the 100GB of free One Drive cloud storage space that Microsoft is giving away if you sign up for Bing Rewards, Google is giving away freebies of its own to commemorate Safer Internet Day. In an effort to ensure that users are protected against hackers and other cyber threats, Google is asking its users to complete its Security Checkup by February 17. The Security Checkup prompts you to verify your account recovery options (email, phone), gives you a listing of recent sign-ins on your account to help you spot any suspicious activity, and allows you to confirm or remove app that have access to your Google account information. In return for completing the Security Checkup, which...
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Microsoft announced a new milestone for its online storage service today: SkyDrive now has more than 250 million users. The company is pointing to Windows 8, which launched in the second half of 2012, as playing a key role in the recent rush of user signups. Microsoft took the opportunity to highlight important changes, such as better uploading speeds, a revamped iOS app, and making SkyDrive the default save location for Microsoft Office. Microsoft released a timeline of SkyDrive's evolution. Image Credit: Microsoft Although 250 million users is noteworthy, there’s plenty of room to grow: more than 700 million people have Microsoft accounts. What are they using, if not SkyDrive? Aside from...
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As we inch closer to the Windows 8 launch, taking place on October 26th, it's becoming ever-more clear that Microsoft has one seriously ambitious day on its hands. Not even taking into account the fact that Windows 8 is a major shift for Microsoft's OS, the company and its legion of partners will be unveiling the first-ever consumer Windows tablets - and I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering how those will fare next to the iOS and Android models that currently dominate the market. Clearly a sign of the company not having enough on its plate already, rumor has it that Microsoft is set to launch "Xbox Music" on the same day as the Windows 8 launch. As it sounds, this looks to be a music service to...
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With any cloud storage service, the speed at which you can upload your files is important – particularly for business users, who are often uploading large amounts of data. Given the need for quick uploads, it’s not surprising that Box has come up with a way to make them faster for business customers. Box is touting the speed boost from its new Box Accelerator as being a 10X improvement over its previous upload speeds. Image Credit: Box So what is Box Accelerator? It’s a combination of software and infrastructure, according to Box. The hardware has been placed in nine locations around the world - and three of the nine are in the United States. The U.S. locations...
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An increasing number of businesses have discovered (or are at least exploring) the benefits of cloud storage. There are cloud options aplenty, from small-potatoes plans designed for a bit of extra storage for a SOHO shop, to massive operations that backup an entire enterprise’s kingdom. It’s an exciting, developing field, and it’s downright fun to see what new tools and services developers are coming up with. CloudBerry Lab has created an intriguing spate of products designed to make managing cloud storage easier, including file explorers for several cloud storage services; a mobile explorer (for Windows Mobile only); and backup tools for Windows Server 2003 / 2008 (32 and 64-bit),...
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An increasing number of businesses have discovered (or are at least exploring) the benefits of cloud storage. There are cloud options aplenty, from small-potatoes plans designed for a bit of extra storage for a SOHO shop, to massive operations that backup an entire enterprise’s kingdom. It’s an exciting, developing field, and it’s downright fun to see what new tools and services developers are coming up with. CloudBerry Lab has created an intriguing spate of products designed to make managing cloud storage easier, including file explorers for several cloud storage services; a mobile explorer (for Windows Mobile only); and backup tools for Windows Server 2003 / 2008 (32...
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It's impossible, these days, to swing a dead cat more than about six inches without running into "the cloud" in one form or another. Whether we're discussing cloud computing as a storage concept, server provisioning, or consumer appliance, moving data into or out of the cloud has been a major topic over the past year. For all the traction cloud computing has found as an idea, however, it may end up being practically useful to a relatively small subsection of the total storage market. In theory, Cloud Computing could free data centers from needing to keep quite so much storage around—provided they've got the time and bandwidth to upload it in the first place.A quick glance at the broadband...
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Israeli-based CTERA Networks is adding its new CTERA CloudPlug and CTERA C200 products to the growing list of devices that let you easily convert external hard drives into network-attached storage (NAS) devices and make them remotely accessible. Unlike other devices that perform similar functionality, such as the Pogoplug and the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar, CTERA's two new devices add an additional feature that these other products lack: automatic online backup.It is the addition of online-based storage that inspires CTERA to refer to these two products as "Cloud Attached Storage" devices (CTERA owns the trademark on that phrase, so don't expect to see other companies use the same expression...
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A new Israeli-based company that goes by the name of CTERA Networks is not only officially launching at CES today, but it is ushering in a brand-new product category: Cloud Attached Storage. Cloud Attached Storage--or at least CTERA's approach to it (it's a brand new concept, so it's way too early to tell how others might implement it)--takes a seamless approach to providing both onsite and offsite storage for consumers and small businesses. The key to CTERA's vision is its CloudPlug device. The CloudPlug is a small box that has an Ethernet jack on one end and a USB port on the other. By simply attaching a USB-based hard drive to one end and attaching the other end to your network, you can turn...
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