“OK … here comes the pain …” –Scarface
In August 2009, I booted up the home computer to offload some photos taken during a recent trip across Europe only to find (to my “delight” of course) that both primary and backup drives had failed. Failed drives on a home computer. No big deal normally; however entombed in those drives were all of my digital photos since 2001 and for a photo “nut” like myself, this was a big deal. I spent 10+ hours over the course of two days setting up another computer, searching for discontinued computer parts, installing operating systems and in the end thankfully I got all of those photos back.
Necessity: The Mother of All Inventions and How the Idea Behind LOCKBOX was Born …
Looking back, I am glad that both my primary and backup drive failed at the same. I am glad that I almost lost all of my digital photos. Why? Because I learned the hard way that I never ever want to be in that position again. No thanks. I pass. And if I think about it, even if I had multiple backup drives, those would not help (knock on wood) if say my house was burglarized while I was on vacation, or what if the house burned down (knock on wood again).
So that got me inspired to dive into cloud-based storage some more and some of the interesting security, privacy and reliability challenges storing data in the cloud. For instance, how would you protect data on a system that is not even yours? How do you protect your data if someone on the inside goes rogue. If you want to exchange data with someone on the cloud, could you do it securely and more importantly easily (if you know anything about deploying PKI you feel pain right now, and if you don’t, trust me you don’t want to know)? Pssss, what’s more interesting is that most of the current players I’ve seen aren’t really doing much or don’t know how to meet those challenges, and hence we developed the LOCKBOX platform. So in one sentence:
LOCKBOX is highly secure and reliable data protection platform for professionals and businesses who want to keep their customer data safe.
And on top of this platform you can easily build all sorts of interesting reliable data protection services. For now that’s all I’ll say about LOCKBOX. If you want to sign up for our limited beta 1 release, head on over to http://www.golockbox.com/beta/Default.aspx. And with that said, I am proud to announce that the beta 1 release of LOCKBOX is released!
–Kevin
