According to the firm, with HiDrive Free, users can back up their data at a central location and access it from anywhere, as well as share that data with business colleagues, friends and family, and without any adverts seen on some other free services.
Despite the service being free, Strato says that clients get the same high levels of security with their cloud storage as their pay-for customers, with twin ISO-27001-certified data centres in Germany.
In addition the firm adds, where in most cases cloud service providers run their data centres in the US where data privacy laws are of a lower standard, all data stored in HiDrive is subject to German data privacy laws, which it claims are some of the strictest in the world in terms of data protection.
Data access on HiDrive is via a PC – mounting the service as a local drive – or via a web browser, or using a smartphone. Interestingly, the service even has a Facebook linking facility, Infosecurity notes.
“With HiDrive Free, a new online storage opportunity enters the cloud where users benefit from plenty of storage space to save important documents, holiday pictures, or music collections - in short, everything of value that shouldn’t get lost. And the best thing is, it’s free”, said Damian Schmidt, chief executive officer at Strato.
Strato says it plans to offer premium packages on Hi-Drive soon, ranging 100 to 500 gigabytes of storage space and from 9.90 to 29.90 euro a month.
Schmidt says that saving data online is always a matter of trust. Many Internet users, he explained, have concerns about data security and privacy when using online storage - especially with free offers.