Blogs

Cardinal Venture Capital, a small Menlo Park venture capital firm (http://www.cardinalvc.com), recently decided to re-evaluate its IT needs and ended up generating significant savings by adopting Content Circles.

Cardinal was looking for a secure team collaboration and content management solution that was cost effective and simple to manage. Cardinal ended up selecting Content Circles because it allowed it to streamline its network, while maintaining complete security and allowing for easy team collaboration. The firm now maintains only one server – a Mac mini with Content Circles software running on it – for providing a secure, encrypted 24x7 file sharing and collaboration mechanism for all of its members without a VPN or firewall, and as a disaster protection solution.

In a thank you note to Content Circles, Cardinal’s Derek Blazensky praised Content Circles service saying, “Transitioning to Content Circles has transformed our small business, saving us at least $1500 per month in recurring costs and thousands more in server hardware, security software and other capital expenses. Not to mention that this system is easier to use and manage.”

We love to hear stories like this one - if Content Circles has helped your business, please let us know!

An interesting story was published by the BBC that discusses the increased use of cloud services for storage and collaboration. The story is largely positive and highlights many of the benefits of the cloud, including flexibility and backup. The story advocates for careful evaluation of what people decide to put into the cloud and raises the issues of security and specifically “trust” in the service. The story includes a strong quote from Computerworld.com’s Marc Elgan:

"Services say give us all your data and use the applications from the internet, and don't worry about anything, we'll take care of the security. It's a value proposition based on you trusting the provider," he said.

"What we've learned recently is that no matter how trustworthy the provider is, it's never as secure or bullet proof as you might think it is," he added.

We believe that Marc’s advice is sound and encourage users of cloud services to expect stringent security and a service that can provide access to data offline. The entire BBC story can be found here: http://bit.ly/aGSuFB

Content Circles users are covered when it comes to security and privacy. Details about the strong security built into Content Circles can be found here: http://contentcircles.com/solutions/secure-file-transfer. We also believe that the Content Circles “private team cloud"/p2p hybrid model alleviates many of the specific concerns raised in the BBC story. The “private team cloud"/p2p model provides all the benefits of the cloud, but also has the benefit of keeping data local and password protected. Quite simply, we’re not asking for the level of trust that cloud services require. Your data always stays on your machines and is 100% encrypted during transfer among those machines. Plus, we offer offline access in the event of internet downtime.

What do you think – are cloud services asking for too much trust?

There’s an interesting story in the March issue of eClinical Trials about using peer-to-peer collaboration technology in clinical trials. The article notes that the requirements of many clinical trials match well with the benefits of peer-to-peer collaboration: strong security; document versioning; and the ability to easily integrate with both internal and external organizations. Peer-to-peer solutions are also noted as cost effective.

We strongly agree. We’re seeing increased interest in our product in environments where security, versioning and external collaboration are challenges. Customers in pharma and biotech environments are placing an especially strong emphasis on security. Scalability can also be a concern.

eClinical Trials is a supplement to Applied Clinical Trials magazine. You can read the article online at this link.

Last night I was notified by a customer that he wasn't able login into Content Circles. I immediately tried to login myself and found out that it was true. Our engineering folks then looked into the issue and found that our SSL certificate (for secure authentication of Content Circles users) expired yesterday. Our internet service provider did not inform us that it was expiring but it was completely our fault for not keeping track of the renewal date. We sincerely apologize to all of our customers for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Fortunately, Content Circles has the "work offline" mode which worked beautifully under the circumstance. When my client failed to login, it offered me the "work offline" option. I just had to type in my password and voila, I had access to all of my files. More importantly, I was able to connect with other people and work as if nothing went wrong, thanks to the power of Content Circles' hybrid cloud/p2p architecture! In essence, the system switched to a pure p2p mode (after authentication via re-confirming password) and allowed me to work while the cloud was down!!

This is our first major outage since we launched Content Circles in early 2009. Needless to say, I'm not happy about it at all. However, I'm very pleased the "work offline" mode worked as envisioned. Tommy Tam, one of our engineers, actually covered this feature of Content Circles in an earlier blog posting titled Outage in the cloud when Google and others were having outages. I re-read it today and I encourage you to read it as well.

In the meantime, rest assured we are working hard here to re-enable our "cloud" portion as quickly as possible.

Update 03/29/2010 12:25pm: Our SSL certificate has been renewed and we are back fully operational.

Two weeks ago, I attended IDC Directions 2010 event in Santa Clara. It was a very good event with many interesting presentations and panels. Frank Gens talk on cloud computing was particularly interesting as it relates to what we do at Content Circles. I thought I’d share some of Frank’s thoughts here.

First Frank re-iterated what he said last year about cloud computing still being “in the chasm” and that it still has ways to go before it will be widely adopted, especially by enterprises. I think we all agree with this but the most interesting parts of Frank’s presentation were IDC’s enterprise survey results that give a clear indication of what enterprises expect from cloud computing. Key results are summarized below:

Top 3 “benefits” of cloud/on-demand model:

• Pay only for what you use
• Easy/fast to deploy to end-users
• Monthly payments

Top 3 “challenges/issues” of the cloud/on-demand model:

• Security
• Availability
• Performance

Top 3 “services” expected of cloud service providers:

• Competitive pricing
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Option to move ‘cloud’ offerings back on premise

I was pleasantly surprised at these survey results because finally a reputed research firm such as IDC confirmed what was behind our thinking – in fact, we took a hybrid cloud/p2p approach to implementing Content Circles service to precisely address the 3 “challenges/issues” listed above! Of course, we provide the "benefits" and "services" listed above as well.

I was also enthused to see “option to move cloud offering back on premise” (or what Frank called a “private cloud”) as a key service expectation of enterprises going forward. Once again, we envisioned this requirement as well and built the “Content Circles Store-and-Forward Service” for on-premise enterprise deployment.

Frank went on to predict big rise in demand for “private cloud” offerings going forward starting in 2010. I think Frank is right and 2010 is going to be the year of the “private cloud”. What do you think?