OwnCloud- A private cloud storage company rises $6.3 million to improve security and privacy-10 points

1. Since Edward Snowden revealed about NSA spying ,  security in the cloud becomes a very important to the organizations and individuals. Even though Public cloud service providers ensure the security standard in their services, companies are still thinking about the privacy there.

2. Mr.Frank Karlitschek wrote  OwnCloud’s code in 2010 to improve the privacy of the corporate data and put that into open source to form a community of developers.

3. OwnCloud  the company was formed in 2011. Now OwnCloud Raised $6.3 million in Series A funding co-led by Devonshire Investors and the General Catalyst Partners,increasing the total funding to $10.1 Million.The valuation of the company is not yet revealed.

4. The company is providing  “Private- Cloud Storage as a service”. Users can download the software in an OVF template format and can install  in their On-premises environment (VMware/Hyper-V/Xen).  This is a 30-day commercial trial version. If users want an Opensource community edition of the Server software ,please visit here. Its free of cost. http://owncloud.org/install/

5. After deploying in the On-premises datacenter, companies can start using OwnCloud just like Dropbox. But the IT department can manage and control the usage of the service. Users also can access their data from anywhere using any device.  So,The difference between Dropbox ,Box like services and OwnCloud is that , companies installs ownCloud in their own On-premises Datacenters. If companies want to deploy  OwnCloud in a third-party data center , they can see the list of service providers here 

6.The new software from the company includes Security Assertion Markup Language(SAML) authentication. Owncloud also integrates with Sharepoint server and Jive unified messaging to access the files from those services.

7.  CERN ,The European Nuclear Research Laboratory  is using OwnCloud to help their employees share their work documents and research files wherever the document or the user is. It is just as a file sharing service unlike Dropbox , which stores large amount of data. 

8. Mr.Bohn called OwnCloud a “next-generation” file sharing system with improved privacy.He said “Dropbox and Box could be its partners in the future”.

9. ”Currently OwnCloud is working hard for its growth” Mr.Rex,CEO of OwnCloud said.”This new funded money will be used for hiring,sales and marketing, and R&D(Research and Development)” Mr.Rex,Added.

10. As per the Company statistics,OwnCloud have more than 100 paying customers, including CERNOwnCloud has more than 1.3 million users worldwide and also  3.6 million software downloads taken place last year.
