The “long years training” are over. The athlete will soon step up to the starting blocks and get into the race. The first alpha version of SFTP.cloud is almost ready to drop.
The core itself (the Portal, Customer UI, Protocol Heads, Storage Connectors, …) is ready, and in the past couple of weeks we focused on monitoring and observability. And, in typical Syncplify fashion, we didn’t do it just for us, we did it for you as well.
First and foremost, our intercontinental distributed monitoring system: 5 probes in 5 different data-centers, operated by 4 different ISPs, in 3 different continents.
The service is degraded, or “down”, when 3 or more probes agree it is. And the whole purpose of this complex distributed system is to give you this:
That’s the public-view of our service’s health. The transfer service is currently not measured because we haven’t released it to anyone yet. Once we do, it will be.
In addition to that, each customer has a per-protocol view of their individual sites’ health inside of their own Customer Portal. Something that looks like this:
And this is not all we did recently to ensure service observability and uptime. Read on, it only gets more interesting.
Two tamper-evident, digitally signed, verifiable logs
All file access and transfer events in SFTP.cloud are logged on two sides:
on the Head that serves the protocol (that we control)
on the Storage Connector that’s in your hands (and we cannot reach)
In your Customer UI you can see the Head’s log integrity, and download a digitally signed evidence file:
In your Storage Connector UI, you can check the integrity of the logs acquired on your own infrastructure, outside of our control:
And to keep everyone honest, so that none of the parties has to “operate on trust”, we open-sourced the log verifier. Anyone can read the source code, verify it’s honest, download it, compile it, and run it against their own SFTP.cloud Storage Connector logs with one simple command line:
logverify verify -dir /opt/Syncplify/sc-conn/audit -identity /opt/Syncplify/sc-conn
The source code is on GitHub here: https://github.com/syncplify/logverify
All that… for what?
Reason #1: addressing the hidden logical fallacy
The one thing that often goes unsaid in the zero-trust SaaS world is that, in most cases, you still have at least one party you must trust: the vendor itself.
And… one is not zero.
We don’t want you to “just trust us”. We’re giving you the tools to verify our claims. And we’re open-sourcing the verifier, so you can audit its honesty and reliability yourself.
Reason #2: treating customers with fairness
There’s this little thing called Service Level Agreement (or SLA, for short). It says that if the service degrades below certain levels, you get some sort of compensation (typically in the form of credits).
The problem is that with most competitors the whole burden of proof is on you. You have to detect the failure, you have to develop the evidence, you have to report it, and you better do it within 60 days or your claim is invalid.
Enough with that! Who wants that anyway?
With SFTP.cloud we monitor the platform, detect degraded services and outages, attribute them to the correct side, digital sign the evidence, give you all the tools to verify our claims, and then we automatically give you the service credits you deserve.
Because we believe that when you buy a service, measuring its reliability and acting on those signals should be part of the service you pay for. It’s that simple.
So… how do you sign up for your 2 FREE MONTHS?
Just go to https://sftp.cloud, scroll to the bottom, and fill in the form.