[Quote]I need my Azure BLOB or AWS S3, etc storage to appear just like any other remote drive[/quote]

(My addition in italics)

IMHO this is one of the key items in opening up the cloud storage marketplace. Although it is possible to buy tools that provide a front-end to the various APIs in use, this just fudges the issue.

Cloud storage today is just like the early days of public electricity supply - the different voltages and cycles seemed good to the vendors as it locked customers into their equipment, but public electricity only took off when all the vendors in a region standardised on voltage and cycles. Although we still have two main markets of US region at 110v and most of the rest of the world at a nominal 240v, each market became large enough to boost demand far beyond what the original plethora of products could hope to achieve.

A common storage access API implemented at the cloud supplier level would transform cloud storage from single-vendor islands to being a utility. By becoming a utility, as simple to integrate into a networking infrastructure as the Synology drive mentioned in the original article, demand for cloud storage will increase far beyond what the current clutch of vendors will ever achieve.

The challenge for the cloud vendors is: Do you want to seriously expand your business? if so then standardise your storage API[/b].