According to a study reported on by TMC, half of small businesses use smart phones to conduct business.  What implications does this have in terms of online storage and data backup? First, small business users need to have the ability to access mission-critical data remotely on their mobile device at any time.  Lack of data access is of growing concern to users, as evidenced by 64% of survey respondents who have been unable to access important information when on the road.  Second, as more and more business is done on one’s mobile device, protecting and storing one’s mobile data is of increasing importance.  

In order to respond to this evolving business and technological context, ElephantDrive engineers are actively working on developing our mobile backup and storage solutions that will allow a user to access important business files from their respective servers at anytime, share files, and automatically backup mobile data.

Today’s New York Times includes an interesting article by Mary Tripsas that focuses on how new technologies are marketed – specifically on how many successful efforts to market new technologies have found a creative way to classify the new technology in terms of an older, more familiar one.

Even though cloud storage has been around in one form or another for many years now, it has just now started to become widely adopted and remains know by many different names.  Cloud storage, online storage, web locker, remote backup, etc…  We’re curious – does “cloud storage” have a clear meaning to you, or is there still an opportunity to define the product in general terms (the way Sony used “memory stick” to define a portable USB drive or early auto makers used “horseless carriage” to successfully juxtapose cars with more familiar modes of transportation).

We caught an interesting blog post by Bob Cringely of “I, Cringely” discussing the Department of Homeland Security’s recent announcement that they would be hiring 1,000 civilian security experts to help protect the nation’s vital information infrastructure.  Security is complicated business and Cringely points out that there may not even be 1,000 true civilian “experts.”

Speaking of security experts, CIO.com asked six of them (or, at least six people they define as experts) about cloud security issues.  If nothing else, it is an interesting read…

Hi all -

We are putting the finishing touches on the localization platform for ElephantDrive’s web-based tools.  This means that in short order, you’ll be able to select you language of choice from a drop down menu and see the labels, instructions, and other copy automatically translated.

Before we release the localization features, we want to hear from you…

Thanks for your feedback….

Our friends at American Data Company organized a great event last week called “De-mystifying the Cloud.” The Keynote speakers from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce.com did a nice job of explaining how their respective platforms operate, and generally provided their answers to typical end user concerns about cloud-based solutions.  They also discussed (though less that we would have liked) how the two platforms are different – AWS providing infrastructure-on-demand and Force providing a platform for application development on demand.

The speakers were also kind enough to make their presentations available, which we’ve in turn posted here:

Amazon Web Services presentation

Salesforce.com presentation

The most interesting elements (to us, anyway) were the stats – checkout pages 11, 12, and 13 of the AWS presentation.  You’ll find that the have more than 540,000 developers using the tools, more than 52 billion objects stored at S3, and since 2007 AWS has used more bandwidth than Amazon.com (a lot!).  Pretty amazing numbers…

Great things happening this week at the ‘Drive. We kicked off our ElephantDrive.EDU initiative with our first partner, Harvard Student Agencies.  We here at ElephantDrive (especially our resident “Harvard Mouth”, CEO Michael Fisher) are thrilled to bring our versatile and simple protection and access platform to the next generation of leaders.  Today’s college students are finding the majority of their class work being performed collaboratively and more often than not, stored on vulnerable laptops.

In the face of declining capital investments and slowing enrollment, educational institutions from K-12 schools to colleges and universities are looking for services (especially data protection solutions) that are easy, dependable, and economical.  For the largest student-run corporation in the world, the turn to cloud services was natural.  “We’ve been looking to add online backup to our menu of services for a while now,” said Austin Chu, Manager of the Harvard Student Agencies DormStore, “and once we found the ElephantDrive solution it was an easy decision.”

We intend to continue to develop features and functionality with the needs of students, faculty, and staff in mind.

Thanks again to all of you for your patience during a protracted maintenance period this week. Many of you expressed concern regarding the service availability and I am happy to report that we have completed the upgrade and that the platform should be performing faster than ever.

Important note: no data was lost during this time; but no new backups were taken.

In the future we intend to proactively notify our users via this blog and email when these events are coming.

Thanks again for being a part of the Herd. As always, we welcome your comments.

NOTICE: During our scheduled maintenance on 7/19/2009, a configuration error was made. While none of your data is at risk, the error requires that we bring down the ElephantDrive service yet again to correct it.

Site and services should be back online before midnight PST.

Thanks again for your patience.

Team ElephantDrive

Hi ElephantDrivers,

Thanks again for your patience while we completed the longer-than-planned upgrades to our infrastructure.  We think you’ll find the performance enhancements well worth the wait.

Special thanks to those users who provided valuable feedback during the process.

Please let us know if you have any questions and have a great day!

- The ElephantDrive Team

 Hi ElephantDrive Community,

We apologize for the delay – as some of you are already aware, we began our maintenance efforts behind schedule.  Because the performance upgrades are substantial, our engineering team felt it was appropriate to forge ahead even with the new timeline. 

As is already reflected at the website, we currently anticipate completion within the next two and half hours.

Originally Scheduled Window:  2:45 pm PST – 10:45 pm PST

Actual Maintenance Window:  9:45 pm PST – 9:45 am PST (+1 day)

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience during this period. If you are an affected user and need immediate access to data, please write to support@elephantdrive.com and allow us to faciliate expedited recovery. We will continue to update this blog throughout the process.

 Thanks very much,

The ElephantDrive Team