Patent attributes
Techniques and mechanisms described herein provide for facilitating communications between one or more client machines and one or more cloud storage providers. According to various embodiments, a virtual machine may communicate with one or more client machines via a standard data storage protocol. The virtual machine may also communicate with one or more cloud storage providers via the internet. The virtual machine may then perform operations such as receiving data from a client machine and storing it to the cloud, retrieving data from the cloud and providing it to the client machine, querying data stored in the cloud, reporting on and verifying data stored in the cloud, and transferring and/or transforming data stored in the cloud.