In the eyes of cloud storage service providers such as Google Storage, any On-Ramps tools, desktop clients, edge devices or appliance that can talk to Google Storage is a gateway.

In the eyes of end users or IT admin, A cloud gateway refers to a central access point that does the translation of LAN based file protocol such as CIFS (Microsoft net share) to the cloud storage REST protocol.

As a non Google storage user, Google storage may refer to the Gmail storage, Google Docs storage. As a Google Storage user, the Google Storage may refers to the Google Storage for Developer (which announced at Google I/O this year).

It doesn’t matter which definition you take, Gladinet got it all covered. The 3 products Gladinet Cloud Desktop, Gladinet CloudAFS and Gladinet Cloud Backup can build the bridge between local access and the remote storage from Google.

This article will focus on the central access point use case. When you have a group of users in a work group, accessing a central file server. The file server has Google Storage attached to it as the tier 2 storage.

First you will need to install Gladinet CloudAFS. After the installation and a restart, you can mount your Google Storage.

Your Access Key and Secret can be retrieved from your Google Storage key management page.

After you mount the Google Storage, you can publish it as a network share.

If the share is used by multiple users, the this is home directory check mark will enable different users to see his/her own content.

Next step you can assign Active Directory (or workgroup) users to it.

Now from a different PC, you can map a network drive to this share. All the users that have permissions to access this share can do a map drive and use the Google Storage from their desktops.

Now the CloudAFS acts as a cloud gateway between end user and the Google Storage.