One day, Tony Gauda, formerly a fraud prevention specialist at MasterCard (News - Alert), noticed something about cloud storage providers. When his laptop filled up and he started looking into his options, he realized that, in essence, cloud providers were selling his own storage back to him. So, instead of copying what other cloud storage companies were doing, Gauda decided to start his own company, and Bitcasa was born.

Bitcasa was founded in February of 2011 and operated for more than six months, perfecting its offering before it received funding. But Gauda believed in the model he was creating. Rather than copying files up to the cloud, Bitcasa would integrate the cloud into the operating system of the device itself, saving to disc, streaming to and from the cloud in real time.

This, in essence, provided unlimited storage on every device you owns. With Bitcasa, Gauda says, you’ll never run out of space and your data is managed behind the scenes. Gauda and his team worked tirelessly to develop the back end platform, and the command line program, which – and this is part of the key to Bitcasa’s model – encrypts data on the client side. As a result of the strong product, nearly 50,000 customers signed up on the first day of availability, and that number reached 250,000 by the end of that first week.

With that success, Bitcasa was able to raise $7 million in series A funding and its storage solution has now spread to more than 122 countries. And, according to Gauda, it is just as fast in Hong Kong as it is in San Jose, California. Bitcasa has 16 patents and takes security seriously, encrypting at the user end. Gauda says it is “thousands of times more secure than {his} own storage.” Right now it is available for personal use on bitcasa.com, and he sees a future in the enterprise space as well. And he left me with these words, which seem as strong a selling point as any: “You will never be without your data on any device, now and in the future.” Sounds pretty good to me. Where do I sign up?

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