At first glance, these services may seem the same. And there are certainly similarities; after all, both create a drive on your desktop that is actually connected to the cloud. However, there are some important differences. These differences give Gladinet Cloud Desktop users more control of their data and the ability to use any cloud storage service provider. Let’s take a closer look.

One critical concern for cloud storage users is data control. What happens to your data if a dispute arises between you and your service provider? Can they hold your data hostage? What about pricing control? Let’s say it just gets too expensive. How difficult will it be to move your data to a lower cost offering? What happens if the cloud storage company goes out of business or has a service interruption. And even if things run smoothly, just who are the people that have access to your data?

With ZumoDrive, your choice for storage is limited to their service. It is an end-end, closed solution, so your data is only stored on their servers. This can have serious implications for data control and migrating your data to another provider could be difficult.

Gladinet Cloud Desktop, on the other hand, provides a front end for any cloud storage service provider. It turns Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal where your Gladinet Drive has a folder for each storage service that you have mounted.

This means you can transfer files or folders between service providers with a simple drag and drop, making migration trivial. It also allows you to create automated backups from local sources to the cloud or from cloud sources to cloud targets. You can backup or upload to multiple targets simultaneously, thereby creating mirrors of your data and less dependence on any single service.

For example, you can backup your documents folder to Google Docs and Windows Azure storage simultaneously; you could backup your Google Docs account to any service provider you choose; you could simultaneously take advantage of every free storage offering.

To further put this in perspective, let’s imagine that you were an Amazon S3 user with 20GB of data stored in their cloud. Now along comes Google with an announcement that they’ve added the capability to upload any file type to their storage. And by the way, its only $5 per year for 20GB! The question for you may not be: “Do I want to move?” Its more likely: “How can I do this easily?” If you were using Gladinet, all you have to do is go to the Gladinet Drive on your desktop and drag your Amazon folder into your Google Docs folder and your migration is done. And if another provider comes along with a better solution, you are free to switch again.

For security, a common issue when discussing cloud services, Gladinet also supports data-at-rest encryption for your files when stored in the cloud so they can only be read by you, on your machine.  Even the service provider will be unable to unencrypt your data.

Finally, Gladinet Cloud Desktop has many optimizations to make it as fast as possible. It always uses the best available protocol to access the cloud storage service. For many, this means REST, but for others WebDav or other protocols\APIs may be leveraged. The product also includes support for FTP and the ability to connect to mount any UNC addressable storage.

For more information about the capabilities of Gladinet Cloud Desktop, visit http://www.gladinet.com