Dev Grant Spotlight: encloud

Businesses hold trillions of dollars of valuable data which, according to research firm Ocean Tomo, comprise 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies. New tools leveraging decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin are helping businesses capture more value. Encloud, formerly known as 180Protocol that lets you easily onboard and ecrypt data to the decentralized web.

Through their prior experience operating as a fintech company, the team behind encloud learned three valuable lessons: 1) cloud services are onerously expensive to deploy; 2) organizations remain reluctant to deploy sensitive data on the cloud (because of privacy and security concerns meaning the value inherent in data remains trapped); and 3) without an intuitive and frictionless user experience, no solution will be deployed at scale.

Today, many companies are forced to invest significant resources into the cloud to deploy their data. However, vendor risk and security issues mean data exploitation persists that prevent the effective deployment of commercially sensitive data into the cloud, and can result in substantial loss of revenue and organizational value.

Funded by a developer grant from Filecoin Foundation, encloud enables the next generation of scaling tech companies to commercialize sensitive data by solving these issues.

Encloud is creating an off-the-shelf web services portal for the decentralized cloud. The application will be the entry point to access cost-effective and privacy oriented cloud services. The offering includes enterprise standard envelope encryption as default, privacy enhanced compute, and a non custodial key management service. It also leverages the distributed and resilient design of Filecoin via a frictionless and intuitive user interface. More, encloud’s application enables recurring commercial collaboration through technology, like data unions.

With the grant, encloud is building privacy services at scale for data on IPFS and Filecoin. This grant is the second in a series of dev grants which is ultimately intended to enable encloud to offer its command line interface and user application on an open-source basis to a wide audience.

This project is also made possible in partnership with Bacalhau, a platform for easy, scalable, and cost efficient, data computation.

FF’s grant funds will help encloud establish its operating model, which involves a hub-and-spoke platform model delivering a core set of services hosted on partner storage provider hardware, alongside a lightweight web or desktop application designed to enable fee paying clients to use Filecoin web services either via encloud’s application directly or through a white label offering.

The encloud application is available open-source for all to use today; a premium version targeting scaling technology companies handling sensitive data will soon be launched. The application can be downloaded and then deployed from encloud’s website.

The application is designed to deliver one-click deployment for data users onto Filecoin and IPFS. Currently, users can use the application to encrypt and store data, share encrypted data, and manage their public and private key pairs. The next release will improve the user experience and visual appeal of the application along with further refinements including encrypted CAR files and frictionless deal-making for clients and SPs. Expect these upgrades in the next month. In the next few months encloud will additionally be adding compute and private compute to the application.

Crucial to the strategy of encloud is to offer all crucial services offered by the major cloud incumbents, useability of an off the shelf offering like Dropbox, combined with privacy across the data lifecycle. With this combination the encloud team believes that clients will pay to deploy their data on Filecoin, and with a subscription model for the services offered.

Encloud are also developing key partnerships with both large-scale SPs and critical applications already operating in the Filecoin network. Through these partnerships encloud will operate a revenue share model and deliver bespoke solutions at low cost so that SPs can frictionlessly create client revenues through deal making.

With large-scale enterprise data sets come increased risk and concern about the privacy of confidential information. The data privacy software market is valued at $1.68 billion and is forecasted to grow by nearly 41% to more than $25 billion by 2029. This market growth will transform IPFS by delivering real-world data and use cases to the network at scale, meaning more privacy, which leads to greater enterprise centricity and more value creation for the entire network.

The Filecoin Dev Grants program helps advance projects and aims to award additional grants to boost development in the Filecoin ecosystem. Check out our other grant recipients and learn how you can apply for a Filecoin Developer Grant.