Syncplicity Aims to Help Businesses Manage Their Data in the Cloud

Two of the biggest trends of 2009, cloud computing and the proliferation of digital devices, have combined to present a dilemma for companies trying to protect and support their data across multiple platforms.

Whereas employees and team members increasingly need to access and share documents wherever and whenever they are, over a variety of devices, traditional IT administrators have not had the tools to support that kind of usage pattern while preserving the integrity of their data.

It’s this gap that the startup Syncplicity hopes to fill.

I met with the company’s CEO, Leonard Chung, in his San Francisco office to look over the company’s new business service, which debuted today to provide a centralized file management system featuring automated backup, instant synchronization, sharing capacity, integration with web apps, and an “infinite” version control all as one integrated solution.

“Since we launched our consumer service a year ago, we have been carefully listening to our customers and potential customers about what requirements were important to them,” Chung told me. “And what they told us is they wanted centralized data management. For our customers it is beyond critical. It is a showstopper.”

And, although the first version of Syncplicity was developed for consumers (much as was the case at SugarSynch, another startup in this space I reviewed last week), Chung says, “We always knew we would build out a business service. It is a more lucrative market.”

Accordingly, the company took on the central concern of any company as it lets its data go off “into the cloud,” and that is instituting the highest level of encryption available. “We use the only encryption technology certified by the U.S. government for “Top Secret” usage,” Chung told me.

This means that the data is encrypted even when it is “at rest,” not just when it is being sent. The company takes an additional step of maintaining two data centers, one with the encrypted data, the other with data keys. They “speak” to each other only in a transient mode.

Listening to this, suddenly I realized what had to have been the symbolic cultural turning point in the switch from behind-the-firewall mentality of traditional computing, to the new willingness to allow data to be stored in the cloud.

It was, of course, when incoming U.S. President Barack Obama, who had been informed that he would no longer be able to work on his beloved Blackberry, because of security concerns, told the Secret Service, “Find a way.”

These days, large organizations like Motorola, Kellogg, and the Los Angeles Unified School District, as well as media industry leaders like the BBC, are using Syncplicity to administer their data in the cloud. It’s much cheaper, of course, but it also allows employees to share data via smartphones, desktops, laptops, notebooks, etc., thus responding to the digital device overload common in our work world, circa 2009.

Maybe the feature that impressed me the most about this service is its “infinite version control” solution. Rather than using time as the organizing principle, Syncplicity relies on the “geneology” of a file to offer the latest update, regardless of when or where in the world that version has been updated.

This, says Chung, is critical because over half of the company’s customers are overseas, juggling multiple time zones and work flows in ways that renders time, per se, irrelevant.

A lot of the company’s effort this first year has been to develop a user-friendly control panel that allows administrators to set policies along a range of concerns (corporate security vs. user customizability). Administrators can dial one way or the other on a number of controls, a degree of flexibility demanded by the company’s early customers.

So far, according to the company, it has 75,000 customers, managing 250 terabytes of data, and some two million files. But the key metric to Chung is the amount of data his users are managing via his service, which he says is, on average, 5 GB, or much more than the 2 GB available for free.

“That is the key metric,” says Chung. “How much data?” He adds that the company is already shepherding the equivalent of “50 to 60 Library of Congresses” through the cloud each month.

The business service is priced at a base price of $45/month for three users and 50 GB of storage with options up to unlimited number of users and unlimited amount of storage. Most of its customers are small businesses, with 25 users or less.

One disappointing thing about the Windows-based service is that it is not available for Mac users yet. Chung promises a Mac-friendly version in 2010.