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It’s happened again. This time Iron Mountain is exiting the online backup business.

Iron Mountain is a well respected name, so why did it shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business?  Various analyses show that it cannot keep pace with emerging technologies whose cost structures are very competitive.  Companies like AltDrive which offer unlimited backup for a small fee are out competing the biggies and their entrenched technologies.  We expect more to fail in the coming years.

Iron Mountain was charging $0.50/GB/month. Compare that to AltDrive’s charge of $0.15/GB/month — more than three times the cost. Plus AltDrive has a better overall offering.

If Iron Mountain is serving your online backup and you are concerned about where the service is headed and are interested in a more cost-efficient offering:

AltDrive can help with your business online backup. Two month free trial and support.

Wow!

Amazon Cloud: All Your Files Are Belong to Us

At AltDrive, we securely store your file data after it has been encrypted and transferred to our servers. And, no, we don’t own your files. You do.

Since you can control your own encryption key, we cannot access the data if we wanted to so you have complete security. Please be aware of third parties that use Amazon S3 ad the backend storage.

AltDrive’s Seattle area primary data center was built in a very strategic location. The Seattle Metro Area Fiber Ring runs north and south around lake Washington. The data center is located on the path of the north end of the ring. Literally every piece of fiber that hits the Westin building traverses this ring.

On the map below our location is represented by the Red spot near the AltDrive logo.

As a consequence, AltDrive has a truly redundant fiber high-throughput network for high availability managed online backups.

You can sign up for a free two month trial at: https://altdrive.com/signup

Contact us to sign-up at https://altdrive.com/partners.html

This is an interesting article.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Some-online-backup-services-insecure-736179.html

AltDrive provides unlimited and secure backups with no bandwidth limits so your backups go fast.  Please consider our service, we would love to have your business.

It’s easy! Get started backing up with the two month free trial.

This is a great post explaining the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html

AltDrive uses AES encryption in CTR (EAX) mode to encrypt customer’s files. All file data is AES-256 encrypted before it leaves your computer in transit over the public internet to AltDrive servers. All control communications utilize 2048-bit SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. This implementation results in a backup of your file data where no one but you has any idea of what has been exchanged.

You can choose to manage your own encryption key so that no one, including AltDrive personnel can access your data.

Lastly, our security implementation has been independently audited with success.

Note that we do not call it “Military Grade Encryption” since there is no such standard and it would not be honest to do so. Regardless, it is economically unfeasible and would require a massive supercomputer years to decrypt the data… assuming you choose a non-trivial pass phrase to generate an encryption key.

At AltDrive, we strive to be the best managed online backup offering available. As such, we noticed that many customers have duplicate copies of files, photos, videos, office documents, etc.  AltDrive’s response: Client Side De-duplication

With every backup, AltDrive now detects duplicate files so that your backups happen faster and upstream storage is reduced.

The is a win-win for everyone.  It is faster, utility costs are smaller, and it is greener.

Here is a bit of information on what sets Managed Online Backup apart from the rest.

With AltDrive Managed Online Backup, you control your encryption key.  It is never transmitted to AltDrive.  This means that once your encrypted data leaves your computer where it is stored on the AltDrive servers, no one, including AltDrive personnel, can decrypt it.  Most other similar services might say they use SSL and encrypted file systems, but in the end they CAN access your sensitive data.  It’s not that we do not trust our personnel; with AltDrive, we prefer to not have to. So your tax records, financial documents and other sensitive data is secure and recoverable 24x7x365.

This means that there is a bit more responsibility for our customers.  They need to safeguard their encryption pass phrase somewhere secure, e.g. safe deposit box, encrypted file online somewhere, etc. That said, Altrive Home users can elect to have AltDrive manage their key. AltDrive Biz customers do not have that option and must retain their passphrase or encryption key.

For a free two month trial, sign up here.

AltDrive now offers white label service.  As a provider of Internet and IT services, you can partner with AltDrive to custom brand and resell its advanced secure managed online backup service to your business customers.  The Biz Service can accommodate thousands of customers and their backup accounts. Please send an email to white_label@altdrive.com or fill out the contact form here. Some features:

• No setup fees
• No branding fees
• No term contracts
• Recurring monthly revenue stream
• Hosted on AltDrive Backup’s infrastructure
• Set your own plans and pricing
• Fully branded reseller and end-user online backup web portal
• Custom reports
• Most advanced online backup system – custom sets, schedules, compression, deduplication, incrementals, throttling, …
• Extremely advantageous price model

If you are an IT provider, MSP provider, or colocation facility operator, your own custom backup service can strengthen your brand, enhance your offerings and increase monthly revenue.