One of the key issues facing companies when they put their content in the cloud is security, but what if you could send your documents to the cloud without security concerns? CloudAlloy, a company displaying at the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt this week, breaks your documents into pieces, spreading them across the cloud services and putting them back together whenever you call the document.
Vinay Purohit, founder at CloudAlloy says it’s a simple concept. You just split the document into pieces, encrypt those pieces and then pull the document back together on your device. Purohit says by breaking these documents into pieces, it makes it very difficult for hackers to put them back together, but he says, “the encryption makes it bullet proof.”
For now, the service works with Amazon S3,  Google, Microsoft and HP. Purohit says you could also combine local storage in a data center and the public cloud services in a hybrid model. However you do it, it normally requires at least 2 services (although he says you could potentially do it with one service with an eye toward layering on more services later on), and the more services you layer on, the more secure it is likely to be by spreading the pieces of the document over multiple services.
Once you call the document, the pieces are pulled together and Purohit insists there is no latency in this process. In fact, he suggested it would be faster than simply calling the entire document in a more traditional document retrieval scenario, and as long as the services are up and running, he said there should be zero errors when putting the document back together.
If you’re wondering what happens if one of the services goes down, he said, they store a bit of extra information with each piece they distribute to a cloud service, so they can still put it back together even when a cloud services stops working. If two services were to go down, CloudAlloy would offer a plan to let you get it back, but it would require additional fees to have this level of service.
And although the service works just across the four cloud storage vendors for now, Purohit said if a large enterprise customer truly wanted to add a particular service, they would be willing to work with them to add it to the mix if they were large enough.
The company has been around for two years and is completely bootstrapped by Purohit. They have two large reference customers, whom he would not name, who are working on a trial basis, but if they pass their trial Purohit said the customer plans to distribute CloudAlloy on every desktop and mobile device.
CloudAlloy offers a simple way to secure the cloud, one that doesn’t require user input or heavy involvement of IT. You simply sign up for the service and as you move documents into the service, it breaks them into pieces for you automatically giving companies a simple, but effective way to ensure document security in the cloud.