Bitcasa Regionalizes Cloud Storage

Bitcasa, Inc. announced that its customer data will be stored in the region of each user.

For users, storing data locally means faster performance, a greater level of privacy and less risk. Additionally, it can help users dealing with sensitive data avoid legal issues associated with data residency, which can be particularly important for industries where there is a high level of regulation, such as healthcare.

“Data privacy has become a concern for many cloud storage users in recent years. While our user-controlled encryption ensures data is secure, keeping data within the region of the customer further reinforces our commitment to privacy,” says Brian Taptich, CEO, Bitcasa. “This also opens up new opportunities for customers that were in the past worried about losing control of their data.“

Bitcasa is a consumer cloud storage service to keep customer data in their specific region. Other popular services send user data back to the US to be stored (regardless of where the user is located), which leaves data vulnerable to interception and surveillance.

Its client-side encryption protects data before it leaves the device to ensure that no one (not even Bitcasa) is able to view customers’ data. With this move, customers will also have the added assurance that their data will be local to them. For instance European users’ data will be stored in Europe, and customers in AsiaPac will have their data stored in APAC data centers.

Taptich added: “In the coming months we will also allow customers to explicitly store data in whatever region they choose, regardless of their location. In addition to meeting every privacy requirement, this will also give our customers more flexibility and control over where and how their data is stored.“

For developers, Bitcasa announced its vision for the Bitcasa CloudFS API, which will include regionalized storage and the ability to orchestrate data between cloud service providers. Bitcasa’s secure, performance cloud file system (FS) also provides smart caching technology, as well as media transcoding and streaming functionality to enhance data accessibility and end-user experience.

Bitcasa‘s cloud storage platform currently stores more than 40PB of data for customers in 140 countries around the world, and has experienced 99.999% uptime since launching two years ago.