Running own system for email, chat, projects and code

You may wonder, why running an own system at all? What are the benefits if there are so many good options in the cloud, and usually they are cheaper or even free?

It is so easy to signup for like a GitHub account, Gmail account, Skype account, and they are all for free for the most part. You can start using them in seconds.

But wait, are they really free?

Personal perspective

The fact that you do not pay money does not mean something really is free. You pay with information about yourself, your activity, your location, your purchases, everything. Plus, you really are at the mercy of the service provider.

Many people say: “I am a good person, I have nothing to hide, I am unimportant and uninteresting. No large corporation would bother with looking at my information”

However, do they realize that often employees of these companies have access to this information as well?

Let me give you a few points to consider:

1. Your email contains history of all your online purchases. Somebody looking at them may learn:
   • what and when you purchased
   • where you live, your home address
   • who is living in the household
   • children and their age you have
   • where and when you go on vacation
   • when and how long you are away from your home
   • how rich you are
   • what kind of expensive stuff you have at home
2. If you have bank notifications to your email, somebody looking at it may learn:
   • about your spending
   • about your income
3. If you have your appointments and meeting notifications to your email, someone can learn:
   • who you are meeting with
   • when you are meeting
4. Do you have any doctors or health related notifications to your email, someone can learn:
   • about your health issues
   • therapy you go through
5. Instant Messaging, Chat tends to contain less personal information of the kind, but on the other hand, it usually contains more intimate information. Conversations with close people, family members and personal pictures people like to share. Is it something you are comfortable sharing with some company employee having access to? This is not a hypothetical tread, this has already happened.

These are just a few examples, and there is more for sure. Are you comfortable giving away all this personal information not only to “companies” but to their employees?

Business perspective

All the personal points apply to some extent to businesses as well. But this is not all. There is a lot more.

1. You use some cloud email provider, and you discuss a new project or a startup you have in mind. How can you be sure that somebody at the company hosting your emails is not reading your messages and stealing your ideas?
2. You have this great project idea, and you work on it, you make progress, resolve complex issues. If you use an email provider, someone can watch the progress and use all the information to replicate what you do.
3. So, if you use a public service provider, your trade secrets are not protected; they are not safe.
4. If you store your software source code with some public service provider, you give away all the code to the provider or someone working at the company.
5. But not only that, you also give away control who can access the code. What is someday your access and your team access to the code repository is disabled?
6. Let’s say you work on an open source project. You do not care who can see the code. In fact, you want the code to be seen by as many people as possible. But then, the service provider may decide that your project violates some policies and is therefore taken down. You have copy of your code, but you lose all the community around the project.

There are a lot of reasons, both personal and business to host your own services. However, skill set and time constraints do not always make it possible to run and maintain an own system.

Here we come. We offer you help. We offer you our skills and our time to help you to run an entire system, configured and ready to use. We maintain the servers and software, you maintain your users and your users’ data.

Hold on

You may think, if Tygrys company and Tygrys employees maintain my systems, doesn’t it mean they have access to my data too?

At Tygrys

1. At Tygrys we take customer’s data privacy seriously and strictly prevent unauthorized access.
2. Our ToS does not give us rights to access users’ data or scan users’ information.
3. Tygrys makes money from protecting your data and running servers for you.
4. We do not have any mechanisms or interfaces to access end-user data.

Public service providers

1. In contrast, public service providers, by design, have access to users’ data. They scan email or chat messages, they analyze software code content, and they read messages. Usually by AI and other automated algorithms. But the same data is also accessible to company employees.
2. Public service providers do not even hide this, in fact, when opening an account with them; you accept ToS contract that allows them to access users’ data.
3. You do not even have a choice on this matter, and your options to sue the provider for data miss-use are limited.
4. Note, public service providers make money from your data, that’s the core of their business