Cloud Desktop!: Try Gladinet Cloud Desktop

In my previous post, Cloud computing and  Cloud Computing in Plain English, we have seen what is cloud computing along with few of cloud computing apps that are available today. We have also seen vSphere Cloud Operating System Video which is latest data center OS (Cloud OS) from VMware.

Now it is time to bring cloud computing to your desktop PC. What if you are able to mount Windows Live Skydrive, Google Docs and Google Picasa as a virtual network drive on your Desktop PC?  These are all examples of Cloud storage and we will see how to mount these along with other services as local folder on your windows box. 

Welcome to Gladinet Cloud Desktop. First download the starter edition of the Gladinet Cloud Desktop beta on your machine. Once installation completes, Gladinet Cloud Desktop prompts for initial settings.

It will ask for a password if you check Encrypt Profile (For experienced users) and press OK. It now creates a profile if it doesn’t already exist.

Then following Gladinet Cloud Desktop window appears with three different options.

Now if we select “Mount Disk Storage or Web Storage As Virtual Directory”, following Gladinet Cloud Desktop window called “Virtual Directory Manager” appears to setup different cloud service providers to mount these inside virtual network drives your machine.

Let’s select “Google Picasa”…

Once you press “Add” button, it will download the corresponding plug-in from Gladinet. Press “Yes” to continue by reading the message and mount Google Picasa inside the virtual network drive.

I have repeated same steps for Windows Live Skydrive and this is how it looks on my machine after mount operation is completed inside virtual network drive.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop also supports Amazon S3 but I haven’t tried it.

The following video is a useful introduction to Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

Refer to online documentation available on the Gladinet website.

But all this convenience comes with a cost of privacy and the benefit of ease of use. Which one will you choose? How will you manage the security of data on the corporate networks if such apps are allowed?