There was a time you couldn’t accomplish much in just a few seconds. Now you can.

You can share photos with friends and family. Do your banking. Book a vacation.

And now, you can even transfer files to and from cloud storage. No need to rewrite scripts or make big changes to your systems. Just point and click. We recently demonstrated how to do this in our webcast, “Direct to Cloud Storage with IBM Connect:Direct.”

Direct read/write access to cloud storage is now available at no additional cost to IBM Connect:Direct customers. Version 4.3 for Linux is certified to run on Amazon Web Services and provides file transfer to and from Amazon S3 cloud object storage, allowing you to reduce costs, speed development and take advantage of cloud analytics. It also supports the High-Speed Add-on option to accelerate the movement of big data over big distances, cutting transfer time from days to minutes – wherever your cloud storage is located.

As we developed this capability we talked to a number of customers who rely on IBM Connect:Direct for reliability, security and governance in transferring critical data. Here’s some of what we heard:

• Customers in the insurance industry told us they want a way to lower the cost of massive volumes of data currently archived on tape and increase reliability by using the cloud.
• Financial services customers need to load huge data sets quickly to fuel advanced analytics and AI in the cloud.
• Those in IT application development want to deploy new applications faster by loading data from their data center to the cloud.

And the use cases continue…backup, disaster recovery, augmenting local storage, compliance. You can probably think of others.

We started with support for Linux and Amazon S3, but this is just the beginning of our journey to remove the barriers between on-premises and cloud environments. Support for additional cloud service providers is planned.

If you want to learn more and see for yourself how to transfer data between cloud and on-premise environments in a few seconds with a few clicks, we encourage you to watch the brief webcast here.