Storage Made Easy Review
London based Storage Made Easy, formally SME Storage, was founded in 2008. They are wholly owned by Vehera Ltd., a private London-based limited company. In its early days, Storage Made Easy raised $1 million in seed funding from IDJ Private Equity Investments. They have used that money to craft a leading storage service they can be proud of. They have several European offices including in the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Moldova. This is not a traditional cloud storage service like DropBox or JustCloud, rather they are an enterprise file sharing and synchronization solution. Their goal is to enable users to manage their private and public file sharing into one integrated and easy to manage storage infrastructure. Their service has an impressive array of features, and due to the nature of this service, we recommend them to all small to enterprise business users.
Features
The standout feature of this service if the seamless search across all clouds. What this means is that since the Storage Made Easy backup plan can support over 45 public, private, and SaaS data clouds, you are able to search for a file across all of them at the same time. This feature not only saves you the time of searching through each cloud individually but it also shows how well integrated all of your clouds are, thus making management of your cloud(s) a dream. Other features include:
- Rich Web File Explorer works from your browser
- Windows, Mac and Linux desktop tools
- Create collaboration groups and workspaces
- Web access
- Mobile apps for: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows phone
- Office Software Integration
- Cloud to Cloud Transfers
- File versioning and locking
Ease of Use
The whole idea behind this service is to make cloud usage easier, so it is no surprise that their own service is amazingly easy to use. File sharing is a dream regardless of if you are using sharing links or emails. There is also workspace collaboration where, as the name suggests, you can create collaboration groups and workspaces. Additionally, if you are a business or enterprise user, you can even receive event notifications, so you can keep track of changes made by your team. The whole service allows you to simultaneously manage most if not all of your clouds, and this process is dramatically streamlined as you are able to set governance and audit controls.
Pricing
You can check out their free trial and test 5GB of storage for one user for a limited time. Then you have four pricing packages that you choose from:
Personal costs $59.99 per license, which comes out to around $4.99 per month. This includes: 5GB+ storage for 1 user and you can manage up to 30 clouds.
Business on the cloud costs $5 per month per user. This is designed for team sharing and collaboration. You get up to 10GB of storage space per user and supports up to 40 clouds.
Business Iaas costs $8.50 per user per month and is for a minimum of 20 users. It includes everything from the Business on the cloud plan and can also include more dedicated storage, custom branding and is deployable to Linode, EC2, RackSpace, and Memset.
The Enterprise package is priced on a case by case basis depending on your needs but is designed for a minimum of 50 users and can support over 45 different clouds. It includes interoperable protocol gateway and it works with VMWARE, Hyper-V, XEN, and KVM.
Security
Storage Made Easy uses Amazon S3 storage, so you know that you are getting top level security with this service. However, since you are not actually storing all of your files on the Storage Made Easy datacenter, security is less of a concern anyway, except for the possible vulnerabilities that come with file sharing. You can be rest assured that too is covered. All your files and folders are shared in an encrypted state, and are locked with time expiry and passwords. The only people that can see your files are the people you have specifically selected.
Customer Support
We were actually surprised by the rich array of support given by Storage Made Easy. They provide email support for everyone but the free users, and even go so far as to provide on demand Skype support for business and enterprise users. They also have a thorough bank of information in their FAQs, Wiki pages and community forums.
Summary
For anyone who juggles multiple clouds at the same time, this service is the answer to your prayers. You are put in the driver’s seat with an intelligently designed dashboard that integrates all the information that you need to be able to breathe again. We would highly recommend trying their free personal or business plans, and test it out with your other clouds to get a good feel for this great service. You can also get a 14 day free trial for their Enterprise package. With their great features and support, you will not be disappointed.
