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With all of the talk about Web 2.0, social networking apps, Twitter, Facebook, etc., it appeared to us that the day was upon us to take data sharing to a whole new level for businesses. Simply being able to FTP files all over the planet had become archaic and emailing large files was… well, just a really bad idea.

What if you could securely share files with whomever YOU invited?

With today’s file sharing technology, this isn’t as easy as you’d think. Let’s take a look at this in a bit more detail.

• • FTP, WebDAV, and similar web-based protocols: First of all, these have been great protocols, but they’re not exactly the easiest things to configure for use. They typically require an administrator to setup some form of access to a web server of sorts. That’s problem #1. In Web 2.0 world, who wants to bother IT for something of this nature? And if you’re IT, do you really want everyone in your company coming to you to setup such accounts?

    Assuming you have a benevolent IT staff, your next issue is one of replication. In order for files to be shared via these tools, they will have to be copied to the proper folders. This will require understanding of file sharing tools such as muCommand for copying files back and forth. While this is not very technical or difficult, it does raise the bar for complexity and training. An end user has to create content=> IT has to setup a share to host the content=> end user must copy content to the share=> a link has to be sent to the recipient to download content.

    But then there’s the whole issue of granularity of permissions. Sure, you could always control much of this with a .htaccess file. After all, pretty much everyone knows how to generate them, manage the list, modify the password file and so on. Of course I’m being quite sarcastic. There’s no good way for providing this capability using these protocols. The solutions simply do not scale for one reason or another.

  • CIFS, NFS, iSCSI: These protocols really were not intended for use over the Internet. While CIFS provides the best permission granularity, it exposes a security issue with opening up ports on a firewall. Plus, there is a port mapping problem that arises. For example, let’s say a company consists of 20 individuals, each one wishing to share files with one another and externally with others. Setting things up internally can be done by each individual. However, if they are sitting behind a NAT firewall, then someone will need to setup port forwarding for each client. And this is where the big problem arises. If you’ve got 20 users masked behind a single public IP address, how do you forward a single port request to all of the various users? Getting a block of public IPs for each user is also not a realistic expectation. So if CIFS is the most permission-granular of these protocols, and it has these types of sharing problems it’s hard to see how NFS, iSCSI or other similar protocols will be very usable for this fashion.

This is where Cachengo Hive changes things.

With Cachengo’s Hive applications, there is no need to setup a separate file server just for hosting files to be exchanged over the internet. You’ve got your copy of your files. You’ve got your online backed up copies too. Do you really want to copy them yet again?

To share files with a friend or co-worker, simply send an invite. Each invite uses a uniquely generated encrypted hash to connect the sharer with the intended recipient. And these are one time invites that expire. So you don’t have to worry about someone else getting a token and using it to gain access to your confidential information.

Also, with Hive, each user installation results in a dynamically generated port number that is then managed via a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). When an invitation is sent, it contains the location, port number and authentication token to establish both location as well as trust. There’s no need to obtain the proper IP addresses and port numbers to send to friends.

The file sharing granularity you’ve been looking for

Share files publicly, with friends, friends of friends or specific individuals. It’s all supported.

You determine the level of discoverability for your data. If you want to keep things fairly restricted, you can simply share content with specific individuals or groups that you create. Say for example you wish to share a marketing plan with those in your marketing group. Simply highlight a user for the new group and then click on the Create Group icon. Then add others to the new group. Now, whatever content you share explicitly with the group will only be accessible by them.

Distribute large content without worrying about congesting your network

One of the problems with today’s technology is the more popular certain content becomes, the more of a burden it places on the hosting network. While there are prevalent technologies such as BitTorrents that solve the bandwidth issues, they aren’t suitable for most companies or individuals because they broadcast their content.

With Hive, data is shared. That’s it! If you’ve got a photo album to share with your family or a patch DVD to share with others in your company, you simply share it with friends, friends of friends, or with specific individuals. Once a certain piece of content has been downloaded by at least one individual, all other individuals will receive their downloads from the total download-base.

While files are easily discoverable via our Search tools, you can always pass links to your friends to make downloads much easier. Simply right-click the desired file or folder and then select how you’d like to share the link.