Now that the dust is starting to settle from Symantec’s purchase of Veritas and having weathered the tax bill that came with it we have forward thinking. Symantec purchased Veritas amid some confusion as to their motivation. Now it seems they are starting to leverage the combination of technologies. Symantec is considering the offering of an online backup solution much in the same vein of the Google GDrive.
The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.
So I have a question. Who will protect the users privacy? Will there be any expectation of privacy? We have seen that privacy doesn’t hold a lot of water with Google. As for Symantec’s offering to be called Genesis,
“It isn’t clear to me that backup is really the thing that people are going to be buying,” said Andrew Jaquith, senior analyst with The Yankee Group in Boston. “I think Symantec is probably wise to keep their plans open about how they sell it.”
Sorry, not interested. Call me a cynic.
[tags]Symantec, Google, Genesis, GDrive, Online storage[/tags]
I share your concern about privacy with regard to online storage and backup services. A year back, a friend of mine introduced me to an online backup service provider called IBackup.
Even though I reluctantly took an IBackup account, I don’t regret my decision now. This is because I backup and restore my most important files and folders, and schedule them easily. The interfaces are great to work with and so far my data has been totally secure with them.
As I know, IBackup employ 128-bit SSL encryption for all data transfer.
With their `Snapshots’ feature I can also view the history of files and folders stored in my IBackup account during the previous days.
About the free online storage services offering huge amounts of space for free, all I have to say is that their business model will not work in the long term. Of course, also important is the data safety issues. The coming days will be very interesting as far as the online backup world is concerned.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I always enjoy reader feedback.
cheers