5 Free Channel-Friendly Cloud Services

If It's Free, It's For Me

There's a lot of free stuff out there if you care to look for it. And there are a lot of free services solution providers and cloud providers can tack onto their offerings. Here, we take a look at five free cloud services that are tailor-made for the channel.

Symform

Symform recently unveiled 100 GB of free cloud storage, meaning organizations and Symform's stable of managed service providers can access decentralized cloud storage for no cost. Symform's partners can also offer their customer those 100 GB of free cloud storage as part of a cloud or online backup and archiving offering.

LogMeIn

Cloud-based remote access, support and collaboration player LogMeIn offers LogMeIn Free, a basic remote control utility that lets users access their PC or Mac. While not as advanced as the LogMeIn Pro model, LogMeIn Free offers access from any Internet-connected Web browser; access to Windows PC or Mac; remote control and desktop viewing; copy and paste between computers; reboot/reconnect; basic reports; chat; AES 256-bit encryption; IP address lockout and a host of other features and functions. Partners and managed service providers can offer and use LogMeIn.

SolarWinds VM-To-Cloud Calculator

SolarWinds offers a host of free trials for its application, virtualization and network management software and other free tools, but its recently launched free VM-to-Cloud Calculator gives solution providers and users tangible data when considering moving virtual machines to the cloud. The free calculator takes inventory of all the VMs running on a user's network and after the user selects which VMs they want to move, the VM-to-Cloud Calculator estimates and compares costs for Amazon EC2, Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Servers. Highlights of the free tool include automatically inventorying virtual machines and capturing description, CPU, memory, storage and count; comparing cost estimates from major cloud providers; and generating updates as virtualized infrastructure evolves.

Splunk

Splunk is a data engine that collects, indexes and harnesses machine data generated by applications, servers and devices, whether physical, virtual or in the cloud and enables users to search analyze real-time and historical data from one place. Partners can use Splunk to analyze clients' cloud applications. And with Splunk Free, users and providers get a number of the features available in the licensed version.

Box.net

Box.net, which recently launched its full-fledged channel program, offers users 5 GB to 50 GB of free storage for files that range from 25 MB to 1 GB. The free version also offers mobile app access and file sharing links.