I want to quickly distinguish our Hybrid Cloud offering from our Private Cloud offering since I thinks this may keep coming up in this thread.<p>In the Hybrid Cloud offering (this is our 'classic' or previous offering that's been available for quite some time) we don't store any data on our servers. However, because some communication does happen with our servers (e.g. for registration), we heard from businesses and enterprises that they would like a completely on-prem solution to guarantee no data goes to our servers.<p>This completely on-prem solution is the AeroFS Private Cloud. It's a virtual machine that is packaged as either an OpenStack image or an OVF/OVA file (supporting VMWare/Virtualbox), and in this VM absolutely no communication happens with our servers, period.<p>(and you can easily verify that)
AeroFS is not open source.. and really in this climate we can't say it is going to guarantee privacy.<p>(This does not mean that OSS guarantees privacy, it is just a necessary condition.)
What interest me at the moment, as someone who builds a web application without any user management or storage (i.e. purely to integrate which other storage solutions), is how to integrate with solutions like this behind the firewall.<p>I get asked this question probably 10-15 times a month and the rate is growing. The problem is that without there being a common solution that application vendors can share, they all seem to end up implementing something custom and that looks a complete mess.<p>Anyone know of any inside-firewall storage solution that implements something like this, or is the best available solution LDAP + WebDav and do the rest yourself?
I've been using AeroFS for over a year now and its fantastic.<p>I switched from Dropbox to Aero for all my home computers (of which I have Windows and Linux desktops and Mac laptops) and the unlimited storage (as much as your home computers can hold) is great. Plus the files are only synced within your own computers so security/privacy is much better than uploading all your files to a public service like Dropbox.<p>The only negative as compared to Dropbox is that their client is not as efficient (it's Java based and takes a bit more resources than Dropbox).
Anyone know of a simple comparison chart with the many options available now? (eg- AeroFS/BTSync/SpiderOak/Mega/Bitcasa/Cubby/Younited/Dropbox)
Not sure if others agree, but I think these "privacy"- centered alternatives to "cloud" need to be open source to be taken seriously.<p>Now that is only my opinion - and I am not in sales. But in my view, you cannot pitch a privacy solution honestly without disclosing the architecture of your proposed system, and the only practical way for anyone to verify that architecture and your implementation is going to protect privacy is to look at the source code.<p>Of course, you can pitch a solution and be less than 100% transparent about how it works. And this may be enough to make sales. But there's no way for the customer to really know if you're being honest unless they, or their trusted agent, can read and compile the source code.<p>Assuming there are open source alternatives to "cloud" (e.g. peer-to-peer architectures), then maybe there is a market for "privacy consulting" where customers pay consulting fees for the know-how to use open source alternatives to construct data transfer and storage systems that can deliver a level of privacy that the "cloud" architecture cannot. I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.<p>Anyway, it's good to hear WSJ saying customers are seeking privacy. The market will no doubt respond.
I'd rather see proper home-hosted solutions - a nice turnkey OwnCloud/IMAP/webmail box. The problem is that devices like this would also have to act as your wifi router to get proper turnkey user-friendly behavior.
So, if you use the Hybrid Cloud version, does all syncing have to go through the AeroFS servers, or can machines on the same LAN sync directly to each other?