Within the SafeCloud project, Cloud&Heat develops the SafeCloudBox product. It aims to provide users with enhanced data storage security and disaster recovery capabilities compared to services such as Dropbox. To accomplish that goal, Cloud&Heat uses the SafeCloud Secure File System.
The Secure File System client application provides a FUSE-based mount point to which data can be written and which is then transferred to cloud storage. The client can be run, for instance, on the customers infrastructure such as a datacenter or local office machine. One advantage of Secure File System is that it writes data encrypted to the cloud storage backends automatically. The second and even more important feature is that the Secure File System writes data to multiple cloud backends, thus even allowing data recovery in case a cloud provider's datacenter is not available.
Cloud&Heat operates a number of datacenters across Germany and can deploy the Secure File System in a quite natural way by using several physically distinct datacenters as cloud storage backends.
Cloud&Heat works on integrating the Secure File System into the open source private cloud solution Nextcloud as a transparent storage backend. This allows Nextcloud users to store their data in a secure and fault-tolerant manner, which provides enhanced data protection over classical cloud solutions.
Steve Schmerler, Cloud&Heat