Symform Uses Crowdsourcing Technology to Aggregate Storage across the Internet

There are lots of different cloud storage options out there, but most of them have similar structures, relying on data centers located far off somewhere. In the midst of this, however, is one company that has found a way to store your data in a new and interesting way.

I recently sat down with Praerit Garg, co-founder and president of Symform about his company’s solution, its unique properties and what sets it apart from other cloud providers. The main differentiator of the Symform solution is its crowdsourcing strategy, which aggregates the storage across the Internet. This means that Symform has no data centers, which provides more security and reliability and cost, which is what people want: speed, security and reliability.

Garg points out that local storage is extremely cheap and getting cheaper, therefore, Symform takes local storage and turns it into cloud storage. People contribute their own local storage to the network and, in return, Symform gives cloud storage to its customers. If a customer contributes 2TB to the network, he or she will get a TB of cloud storage for free.  Garg calls it the “bucks or bytes” program, because you can pay for your storage with bytes, contributing twice what you need.

The technology that underlies Symform makes it secure and reliable. The solution monitors your folders and stores the data in the distributed system. Each block is encrypted before it leaves your computer using military encryption. It is shredded into tiny, redundant pieces with 64 pieces and two parity stripes. That means there is no single point of failure breach.

Another advantage is high performance. Normally companies throttle bandwidth, but Symform has turned the problem on its head, fanning out rather than fanning in. It uses the architecture of the Internet creating a virtual pipe and giving access as fast as users can transfer it. With the redundancy policies in place, you only need two-thirds of the instances to reconstruct your data, leveraging the powers of large numbers to get a statistical advantage.

The company has been around for three years and active in 160 countries. It hopes to expand further as it tries to change the landscape of cloud storage forever…

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