Company Spotlight Data Deposit Box

Peter Carroll, Data Deposit Box’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, spoke with Online Backup Reviews to provide their take on the ever-growing online backup industry and the company's goals.

Carroll’s company, owned and operated by Acpana Business Systems Inc. based in Toronto, ON, Canada, entered the data protection market in 2002. He said they began during a time when bandwidth and storage services were expensive, and when online backup solutions were designed exclusively for IT professionals. Right off the bat, he says Data Deposit Box came in and gave online backup a new spin.

“When we entered, we took a different approach… we saw this (online backup) not as an IT tool, but something every business computer user could use and afford,” Carroll said. “To us, your average customer is not an IT person. The average customer is your mother or your father.”

Within the fast growing online backup community, Carroll strongly believes that the real winners will be those that can offer the most comprehensive solutions to “average” users. Data Deposit Box, built for the novice user, features a straightforward design. Anyone can easily install it and it kicks in right away, automatically locating the most popular files and documents, and makes instant online backups whenever data changes. Users don’t need to follow any procedures or set any schedules.

Their set-it-and-forget-it philosophy is proving successful and is appealing to a wide range of small businesses. Although some of their customers are made up of individual consumers and larger enterprises, the vast majority of their clients are small businesses. Carroll says clients are usually offices ranging from one PC to 10 PCs, typically small dental offices, law firms, freelance writers or other businesses too small to support an IT staff. About 75 per cent of their clients are in the US while the rest reside throughout Canada and the UK.

Aside from being sold directly to consumers, about half of Data Deposit Box’s business comes through their popular Reseller and Channel Partner programs, which deliver branded turn-key online backup services to market with minimal capital investment. Successful partnerships with Nerds On Site and Geeks Go On Patrol help sell Data Deposit Box's software worldwide.

Along with being easy to use, Carroll credits his products’ success to how easy it’s delivered. Particularly among small businesses, Data Deposit Box is offered in a way that’s simple to manage and simple to pay for.

“One of our competitors has 21 rate plans to choose from – what consumer would want to make a choice between 21 rate plans?” Carroll said. “We have one rate plan, $2 per GB based on how much you use. We don’t make you commit to any long term contracts or certain amounts of storage… We’ve tried to make it a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Another important element to their products’ success is the maximum-security features involved. Carroll says they model their security methods after online banking websites, employing 448-bit Blowfish Encryption before data leaves a client’s PC. Files are then stored in this encrypted state at their Carrier Grade data center and, through a unique encryption key given to customers, only clients can obtain access to their data. Such security features grant his users peace of mind when backing files up he said.

Carroll warns that security, among many other elements, are vital components to any data protection operation – elements that businesses should seriously look out for these days. As the online backup industry becomes more competitive, he worries small businesses may make uninformed decisions as new firms are now promising online backup services for free while leaving out many important features, including encryption and security. They may promise encryption, he says, but do not use it when storing data on their servers, and some may even state in their terms of service that encrypting your data is not allowed.
 
To help consumers make the right online backup decisions, his company features a white paper entitled Ten Questions to Ask Your Online Backup Provider on their website. He hopes that, above all things, consumers look to reputable companies that can keep their data secure for the long haul.

“We believe that when you’re protecting people's data you have to be protecting yourself as a business too,” he said. “We’re a safe company to invest in and you don’t have to worry about us or your data disappearing tomorrow.”