SCIENCE

Strato has announced the availability of HiDrive, its new online storage product that it claims is the best place for data to be safely stored and shared. Aimed at professional users, HiDrive is set to provide the fastest connection (overall bandwidth of 34 GBit per second), covering the widest range of protocols and the most secure online environment. Providing for unlimited traffic with no file type or size restrictions, HiDrive behaves just like a normal hard disk with users able to access and manipulate data as if it was stored locally. Up to 500GB of HiDrive storage is now available in the UK at a cost of £9 total for the first six months, after which users pay a monthly subscription of £19.

Strato, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is also able to offer the highest security available on the market as all user data is redundantly stored in its two German-based data centres, certified to ISO 27001 standard. The data is safeguarded against failure due to an intelligent and redundant storage system (new RAID level, patent pending).

Users can open, download and upload data stored in HiDrive from their mobile phones as Strato provides access via WebDAV, a protocol widely supported by most handsets. Strato allows for VPN connections, which establish encrypted virtual networks wherever a connection to HiDrive is created, providing for secure data transfer between a client device and HiDrive. Additionally, HiDrive supports SMB/CIFS, the file transfer protocol FTP as well as rsync, which allows synchronisation of large amounts of data with HiDrive.

Damian Schmidt, CEO at Strato commented, “With many online hard disk or cloud storage providers, users don’t know where their data ‘lives’, which raises many security questions. With HiDrive, all customer data is stored in our secure, carbon neutral data centres in Germany and users can access files anytime, anywhere and on any internet-capable device. Germany in particular has very strict privacy laws, so our customers can be assured their data is safe.”

Strato HiDrive also provides these features:

The data on HiDrive can also be archived with STRATO BackupControl, which enables the creation of daily back-ups that are preserved for up to a year. It is also possible to increase the frequency to six back-ups a day, which are preserved for eight weeks.

A ‘security switch’ which disables unencrypted connections.

To share an entire HiDrive online hard disk, a user/business can create several accounts. These accounts will share one public folder but each user will also have a private folder that is accessible only to them.

HiDrive includes a web browser-based file manager and supports all major operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, Symbian, iPhone (via third party apps).