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Our Approach

To make it simple for you to lead your family into a more private, secure, and confident digital life, we've created an ecosystem of products and services built around the concept of self-hosting. Our platform is simple enough to get up and going quickly if you are tight on time, but powerful enough to run a high-tech business on if you want to invest into it.

Never heard of self-hosting? Read about why self-hosting is the gold standard for security and privacy.

The Strategy

1

Own Your

Online Identity

You should always be in control of the main way people identify you online. In today's internet age, that is your email address. Your email address is what you use to login to everything else: your bank, your online file storage, your social media accounts. Does your email look like john.smith@google.com? If so, because Google owns google.com, Google then also owns your identity, and by proxy Google now owns all your other accounts.

Of course, this principles applies to more than just your email. In the future, your online identity may be connected to your cryptocurrency wallet. Make sure to own that to. If you let a company own it for convenience... well, we've seen how that has gone for some crypto early adopters.

2

Own Your

Data

You should always be in control of your personal data: your family's photos, files, notes, to-do lists, contacts, calendars, etc. This means controlling exactly who has access to your data and what it is used for. If your data is stored in a data center at a large company, you have no idea who has access to it or what they are doing with it. If instead your data is stored only on your own devices and not synced to the cloud, then it remains within your control.

3

Own Your

Infrastructure

On top of owning your identity and data, you should also own your own network and server(s), so that you can freely interact with and access your data without any external dependence. By being able to run your own services, you can approach the internet from a position of strength, because you always have a safe place to fallback to. You can exercise your free speech knowing that if you are canceled, you can always come back to the safety of your own systems that cannot be touched. You have the freedom to choose if and when to sign up for externally-hosted services, and you can do so on your terms.

The Ecosystem

Self-hosting is the foundation upon which your family can build a more private, secure, and confident digital life. There's been some great work in the past ten years to make self-hosting more accessible to a variety of users, but unfortunately all solutions that we've been able to find fall short of being usable be most people either because they require some amount of technical know-how to implement, or because they are overly simplistic and don't have enough options to realistically allow their users to move fully off the cloud for their core services.

We are taking a different approach than most, by creating a complete self-hosting ecosystem, with the aim to provide everything needed for a family to realistically start self-hosting with hardly any technical knowledge or up-front time investment required. Our ecosystem is made up of three main components:

  1. Our Iolite self-hosting platform, which runs entirely on your self-hosted server(s) and once setup can run entirely without connection to the internet (though we recommend keeping it connected for updates and backups)
  2. Our various hardware products that come preloaded with Iolite for simple setup and to allow you to grow your self-hosted server setup over time as your family's needs change
  3. Our Cordierite global services, which is software that runs in our privately owned data center and provides a small set of services that will help you in your self-hosting journey, such as our encrypted offsite backup service that keeps an encrypted copy of your data in case something happens to your self-hosted server. Our approach is to run as much as possible in Iolite, which we don't have access to, and only bring Cordierite in on an as-needed and opt-in basis.

THE PROCESS

1

Take Inventory

Use our Cyber Inventory Tool to take inventory of your family's technology usage. This includes what cloud services you use and what you are paying for them and what technology you have at home such as old computers, networking gear, or NAS devices.

Once you've cataloged what you have now and what you are paying monthly, we can show how much simpler life could be if you took ownership of your data, and how much you could save in the long run by having one system for may of your family's core technology needs.

2

Acquire an Iolite Server

If you want the simplest path to cyber ownership, you can simply buy one of our systems that are preloaded with our Iolite platform; all you have to do is plug it in. If you want to save money, have some technical skills, and already have old computers laying around that could do the trick, you could buy a software license instead and install Iolite yourself. Either way, we'll walk you through each decision and make sure you have the information you need to make the best purchase for your family.

3

Configure your Iolite Server

Once you have an Iolite server up and running, you can add user accounts for everyone in your family and start installing apps. These apps are open-source alternatives to the apps you are already used to, and have been optimized to run on self-hosted servers. We host a secure repository of these applications in our data center, so that you can be confident that each one has been tested and vetted.

4

Migrate Your Data

We've written import tools that can download all of the data on your various cloud services to your Iolite server, so that you can have all of your photos, files, emails, contacts, calendars, and more in one place. Don't worry about moving everything at once. Take on one service at a time, and give you family time to adjust before moving on to the next.

5

Turn on Offsite Backups

Your photos and files are important to you, and so we wanted to make sure you have a simple and secure way to backup all of your data in case of a disaster. If you would like, your Iolite server can send an encrypted copy of your data to our data center for safe keeping. Don't worry, we have no way of decrypting the backup and seeing your data, you alone own the encryption key. Our backup service also protects your data against ransomware and supports data recovery, in case you accidentally delete something important.

6

Turn on Remote Access

When you are at your house with the server, you can always access all of your apps directly without any traffic leaving your house. When you leave your house, we've made it simple to stay connected in a secure and private way. As long as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) allows it, your phone or laptop will be able to connect directly to your Iolite server over the internet using an encrypted VPN tunnel. For cases where your ISP is more restrictive, leaving you with a Double NAT situation or a frequently changing public IP address, we've got you covered with domain management and proxy services available through our datacenter.

7

Enjoy Your Cyber Ownership

Now, sit back and relax, knowing that you own your family's data and you no longer have to worry about companies going out of business, hackers absconding with your precious files, or advertisers building profiles based on your online activity. We plan to stick around for the long haul and keep serving your family, but the nature of owning your Iolite server means that even if we go out of business, you can keep using the exact same services and you always have full access to your data.

Start taking ownership of your cyber space today

We believe that the future of software is decentralized and that your should fully own your identity, your data, and your infrastructure. If this sounds exciting to you, we'd love to talk more about how we can serve you. Just pick a time that works best for you. Or, if you're not ready to talk yet, you can sign up for our newsletter.