Secure Data Cloud

The project "Secure Data Cloud“ deals with the use of FLAM for deploying a secure remote data storage. One of the objectives of the new FL5 project was to make the access method network-capable and at the sme time, care was taken to ensure that FLAM can be used securely in a cloud. The purpose of this internal project is to warrant that FLAM is suitable for securing and optimizing clouds.

Since FLAM has to collect a certain amount of data before comression can start (that being a fundamental characteristic since version 1.0) the amount of data transmitted over the network in one move is adjustable. Therefore, latency times caused by DSL do not really matter, since you don't just compress,  you also transfer an arbitrarily large quantity of elements with one network access. That is to say that the very use of FLAM makes IP network caching for solving that problem dispensable. Moreover, compression and encryption are performed locally on the client and just the storage of the resulting segments is done remotely on the server. These two basic characteristics of FLAM along with the option to use smart cards or other HSM via FKME for encryption at the client makes FLAM an attractive solution for secure clouds.

An additional point is the fact that when data are accessed, only those segments that are really needed are transferred. This is not quite the same as s differential transfer method where only differences are exchanged. Still, with regard to the data volume the effect is basically the same, but without the need of keeping a temporary local copy. This approach is even more elegant when not only FLAM's positioning but also its retrieval features are made use of.