Cloud solutions can enhance any managed service provider's (MSP) portfolio of offerings. Providers offering managed exchange server, file server and Web server solutions are looking for options like Box or Dropbox, which may be easily branded with their own company name and used for their own storage services.
While some MSPs have excessive amounts of NAS or SAN storage with low utilization rates, they are seeking solutions to leverage that excess for additional service offerings for their customers. And some providers use OpenStack Swift, EMC, Atmos or Nirvanix for their cloud storage service and want solutions that may be used around those cloud services within their own data center.
Gladinet has an offering geared specifically toward MSPs that provides an access layer around storage services and local file server storage inside their data centers. The Gladinet Cloud Enterprise for service provider solution provides a branded cloud sync and share solution that offers team collaboration and backup, all managed by service providers. The solution is accessed via a browser, mobile device, desktop or through the file server.
The company announced a new version of their solution last month, with support for multi-tenancy as well as self-service rebranding. The updates are helpful for MSPs and resellers looking to deploy access infrastructure themselves in order to present a complete and branded solution to their customers.
The Cloud Enterprise solution from Gladinet offers an easily installable, private online storage solution that includes all public cloud features. Self-service branding enables specification of URLs for branding resources which may be used for user facing components. MSPs maintain control of the entire cloud solution stack with Gladinet's offering, from storage to access infrastructure to client devices.
“We’re very pleased with the interest we are seeing from our service provider and reseller partners," said Jerry Huang, president of Gladinet. "Typically, they will need to provide our solution to multiple customers. With the new version of Gladinet Cloud Enterprise, the process is much easier for them. First they will purchase the product with a block of licenses. Once they’ve installed the product in their data center, they can create sub-accounts for each customer. Each of these sub-accounts can be integrated with separate Active Directory domains and management can be delegated to the customer admin.”
“With this product, it becomes trivial for any reseller to provide a dropbox-like service to their customers with their own branding based on infrastructure that they control," added Huang. "We think that’s a no-brainer and so far our partners seem to agree.”
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
