Cloud storage... If you had asked me what that meant two years ago, I would have looked at you funny.  How quickly things change.  Fast forward to November, 2011, and I have friends' grandmothers asking me if they should back their data up in the cloud.  Dropbox, Mozy, iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive: Almost everyone has heard of at least one of these entrenched players in the cloud data backup and storage sector.

But what about Symform?

If you haven't heard of them, then you need to start paying attention.  Symform is something new, something innovative, and something that's going to appeal to everyone who has security concerns about storing their data in the cloud.

Let's be honest: The chances of someone trying to steal your personal data from the cloud aren't high (unless, perhaps, you're important enough to be engaging in business espionage).  Otherwise, the cloud provides what I call "security through obscurity."  But don't let that sense of security fool you into believing that your cloud based data stores are really secured.

Think about it.  What's preventing a curious Dropbox or Mozy system engineer from taking a peek at your data?  Obviously the company has some security standards and protocols in place, but somewhere along the line there are people who could potentially access your data.

And did you hear about the latest Dropbox Android scare?  Back in August, "white hat" hackers discovered a security flaw in Dropbox's Android app that allowed would-be data thieves to cycle through Dropbox accounts in search of ones which had a security flaw that would allow the theft of personal data.  Dropbox quickly plugged the security hole with an update, but there are still (at least) tens of thousands of people running compromised versions of the app.

Enter Symform.

Symform provides an entirely new approach to cloud based data backup and storage.  They borrow a page from Freenet, a pro-democracy and free speech group that provides a network-based, peer-to-peer, encrypted distributed data store for its members.

Network-based, peer-to-peer, distributed... All of that's a mouthful, but here's what it means in simple terms.  Symform members all dedicate a fraction of their computers' total hard drive space to hosting other people's data.  In return, other people dedicate a fraction of their hard drive space to hosting your data.  

Yes, that's right.  Your data is actually stored on other people's computers -- a lot of other people's computers, in fact.  There are no traditional centralized data center stores involved.  But if your data is on other people's computers, how is that secure?

All of your data is broken into blocks, which are encrypted with 256-bit (military level) encryption and distributed among 96 random computers spread all over the world.  Any given fragment by itself is meaningless, but when your computer needs to access the saved data, it reaches out to those other computers to download the necessary blocks and put them all back together again.  Even if a dozen people from around the world were all able to discern that they had pieces of your data stored on their computer (which they would have no way of doing) and they were able to decrypt the data (which they almost definitely would have no way of doing), they still couldn't put your data back together.  Symform calculates that at least 33 computer users from around the world would all have to come together with pieces of your data and collaborate to have any chance of getting anything even resembling usable data.

Symform also offers a high level of data redundancy, which means that you only need to recover 64 of those 96 blocks to guarantee the successful reconstruction of your whole data block.  For anyone wondering what the odds are against your being able to rebuild your data... well, they're extraordinarily small.  They're so small that you have a higher chance of losing your data at a traditional data center based company like Mozy.   

Best of all, Symform is fast.  If you've ever delt with downloading huge amounts of data from Mozy or Carbonite (or worse, uploading huge amounts) then you'll understand one of the huge limitations of cloud based data backup and storage: Your Internet connection creates a serious obstacle to quickly getting your data.  Symform claims that, due to its software's ability to leverage the parallel Internet connections of 96 computers at a time, its software is 10 to 50 times faster than sending (or receiving) your data to a single traditional data center server.

(Learn more about Symform's cloud storage solution here, including a more in depth explanation of its performance and how it works.)

Despite all of the performance and security that Symform brings to the table, there's something even more appealing about its cloud storage service: the price.

As innovative and advanced as Symform's product is, it's also ridiculously cheap.  Users can sign up for free to get 10 GB worth of storage and can obtain up to 200 GB of free cloud storage by "donating" a similar amount of free space on their hard drives.  Symform also offers an unlimited data storage service for only $10 per month, which covers up to three users.  Additional users cost $3 per month.  There is also a $50 per month plan for servers, with no discounted pricing for additional servers.