Two and a half years ago Tunio Zafer and his team noticed there were serious security and usability breaches in existing cloud services. They decided to develop an alternative to better address users’ needs. Less than three years later pCloud can proudly say it has four million users all over the world. Tunio Zafer explains what the advantages are of the services the Bulgarian company offers:

“pCloud is the place to store photos, videos, documents on which, let’s say, co-workers can work together, have access to them on any of their devices, from any point in the world and at any time. There were several instances when rival companies had breaches and their users’ data had become available to the public at large. That was the reason why security was one of the things we invested a great deal of effort in so as to create a maximum-security service. Our aim is to offer user-friendly services that work combined with a high degree of security.”

What makes pCloud a better system than any other?

“One of the principal problems of data and its availability is that our rivals followed the principle that the entirety of the information in the cloud should be available on the users’ computers so they can work with these files. But this means restricting the available computer space of the end users. Ultimately, they do not have unrestricted cloud space to store anything more than they have on their own computers. This is a problem we resolved with pCloud Drive which gives users access so they are able to work with all of the files stored in the cloud without having to store them on their own computers. But there is one thing that is even more important – security. We offer a service called pCloud Crypto enabling the end users to encrypt the data on their own devices before they are stored in the cloud. The service is so secure that even our system administrators, we as a company that offers the service have no access to the files and cannot see what they contain. These are the two things we are better at than our rivals and we have been investing much effort into making these services even better.”

The company posted a challenge on their website to hackers from all over the world – offering USD 100,000 or the equivalent in bitcoins if they beat the client-side encryption. Tunio Zafer:

“pCloud Crypto was developed over 5-6 months by our team. When we launched it we felt the need to present it to our users – present and future – and to convince them that the service really is secure. So, we challenged hackers from all over the world to try and break pCloud Crypto. There is no code that is unbreakable, it is all a matter of computing power and time. But with our approach and the encryption method we use the code is impossible to break within a reasonable period of time using the computers now available on the market. We launched our pCloud Crypto challenge six months ago in our own work environment where the customers’ files are stored. We didn’t make any demo accounts or demo system for hackers to try and break. It was our way of proving that it really is a maximum-security service. More than 2,800 hackers from all over the world tried to beat our encryption, mostly from America and India, but also from Bulgaria. We started out by offering US 20,000 but then, in the second round we upped the sum to 100,000. Six months later the service is still unbreakable and we proved that our users’ data really are protected. We would like to expand our team in Bulgaria in future, to continue to demonstrate that serious projects can be successful right here, that Bulgarian IT experts are among the best in the world.”

English version: Milena Daynova