BitTorrent’s cloud solution? Bypass it altogether

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Clay Dillow.

Last year’s revelations of the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection programs were not particularly good for U.S. technology companies. Following the Edward Snowden leak, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation predicted that U.S. cloud computing companies could lose as much as $35 billion in worldwide sales over the next few years. Analysts at Forrester projected losses for Internet service providers as high as $180 billion by 2016 in the wake of the scandal.

For most cloud storage and data sharing companies, that suggests rough sailing ahead. For BitTorrent, it suggests opportunity. BitTorrent — the same company behind the eponymous and somewhat infamous peer-to-peer file sharing protocol — has developed a solution for file-sharing between systems and devices that solves a lot of the problems inherent in cloud-based file sharing systems like Dropbox or Box. Sync updates shared files and folders across devices just like those services — but it does so without ever storing that data on remote servers…

Still in Beta, BitTorrent Sync has rapidly exploded to 2 million users (half signed up between November and the end of last year), and while it’s impossible to say if the Snowden affair is behind the rapid uptick in BitTorrent Sync’s user base, its growth does track alongside the unfolding of the scandal. (A marketing push by BitTorrent touting its secure, non-cloud-based approach certainly didn’t hurt.)…

Read more from the source @ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/04/04/bittorrents-cloud-solution-bypass-it-altogether/?section=magazines_fortune

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