Nasuni has launched an interesting service that enables companies to securely use cloud storage.

They seem to provide software that works like a filer/NAS that can be accessed locally within an organization while the filer itself can be associated with one of the various cloud services they work with to actually store data off-site in the cloud. Data moved into the cloud is kept encrypted using your encryption keys. Clever caching mechanisms supposedly ensure good performance.

This is definitely an interesting approach to allow enterprises access the unlimited storage potential of cloud services like Amazon S3 with a pay-as- you-use approach to storage.

See more details of the service here.

Amazon is celebrating 3 Years of S3 with a “3 Months of Transfer-In for 3 Cents/GB” promotion — excellent deal for a short-while atleast .

Seems like DropBox is growing in leaps and bounds. Congrats DropBox!

I don’t know about you – but I can’t handle paper very well! Let me explain -

I do love reading books, magazines like Newsweek and Time, newspapers (…oops – strike that one out!), etc. But when it comes to bank and credit card statements, invoices from cable, phone, lawn services and other sundry companies, I just don’t know what to do with them! Do I just throw them in the recyclable bin? Or should I shred them? Or perhaps keep them – just in case (of a dispute and hence litigation? Just kidding I don’t think I can survive all the extra papers you need to read, sign, read, sign – you get my gist!).

I used to file important looking papers – like those from my health insurance company (yes, the whole book – which I am sure if I started to read it would make me scared enough to kick off heart issues!), benefits information from employers, reference letters from old employers, mortgage and house papers (yeah – the hourlong signing binge at the closing office and while we are talking about this – how about the inspection sheet from when you bought the house?), papers from doctor’s visits…the list goes on and on!

And then there are some that are required to be stored for a length of time – tax filings, supporting documents, pay stubs (are they really required? My pay stub folder must be about 3 inches thick by now!)

What do you do with kids’ activity sheets? Do you think it’s worth it to store them until they grow old and have their own kids?

And oh – coupons! Do you keep them only for a month or so and regularly get rid of the old ones?
Believe me, I have tried all sorts of things – bought industrial strength shredders, filing cabinets, fancy wooden filing cabinets – they work for a while and then I go back to being lazy! And if I tried, my current filed papers would stack to about 12 ft high…okay – I am exaggerating – maybe I want to make you think I am good at organizing

And in spite of all the efforts I have put into handling papers so far – just when I need something – like the IRA application form that you needed to sign and send in 30 days, or your kid’s birth certificate, or the one piece of paper where the bank account was displayed completely, or last year’s AGI (this is one of those deals where I have never learnt my lesson – in any given year, I find several copies of tax filed for prior year – all draft versions -
with completely different AGIs!)  - bottomline is: I CAN’T FIND IT!

A couple months ago, I changed my life insurance benefit amount and the insurance company wanted me to send my then current benefits certificate
back to them – WHAT?! How do I even know what it looks like? I stored
ALL the papers they sent me when I started it – but even after locating those papers and rifling through them – I could not find something that said certificate’.

I wish google handled my files!

These days, if some company does not provide emailed invoices or get online, digital signatures, I try to not even engage them! It’s true! I have become paper averse….

And in this ’save the planet’ era, I guess it even makes sense to be paper free! But what else could we do? Don’t we need papers?

We need DOCUMENTS. Not PAPERS! Electronically stored documents, accessible from anywhere in the world (the internet world – which is expanding by leaps and bounds!), with the ability to send them to anyone on the web, ability to share them, store them in neatly managed folders, with excellent security and ability to track whether the individual we sent the document to did indeed receive it or not!

Therein lies what we at doccurate.com are doing – improving the world just that little bit – innovating with a vision of reaching a market that is just beginning to mature. Stay tuned for more information…

It seems like today there has been a spate of news about reliability of storing data in the cloud.

First there is some news about online backup provider Carbonite losing some customer data (the customers themselves were probably able to backup everything again and possibly didn’t lose any data).

Then there is some news that JungleDisk customers were having issues reaching their files on Amazon S3.

Finally there was some discussion on Hacker News on whether you can trust backing up to Amazon’s S3 or Mosso’s cloud storage offering.

The truth of the matter is that reliable storage is hard — even companies like Amazon and Mosso will have downtime or equipment breakdown that with all the fail-safes and backups and backups-of-backups, you as a customer can lose files. Cloud storage must be viewed as a cheap high-capacity disk where you store large amounts of data and you should be prepared for data loss. You as a consumer should take care to make additional backups of all your data — just like investing in the stock market, you should spread your risk. Unlike the stock market though — you need to spread all your data across multiple backup targets.

This is the Doccurate Blog! Here we will share progress and developments related to the Doccurate.com web-site and service. Doccurate.com is targeting providing a useful document management service.