Is a bag of marshmallows involved at some point? That would change everything.

I should have clarified the remote sync bit. The idea is to only rsync the encrypted deltas of your primary mirror. Doing it this way with an added layer of tracking does incur a ton of additional overhead for your local storage to gain minimized network transfer, though. A better method, one I've actually used in the past, involves a script that scans your rdiff-backup mirror for changed files, encrypts them, and shuttles the encrypted files off to remote servers. The state of your mirror is saved in a simple flat file, one line per entry. You could use a persistent key-value store instead if you like.

I use ZFS for bulk data storage, but then added complexity comes from getting the snapshots encrypted and mirrored to offsite servers with any reasonable level of efficiency. All things considered, I'd say ZFS snapshots are great for local point in time recovery, but you'd really want to use something akin to the "track/encrypt/upload" method described above for maximum efficiency.

Write yourself a simple set of scripts that use rdiff-backup or rsnapshot to perform differential/incremental backups to an internal host, make a secondary mirror encrypted at a file level with GPG/PGP, and use rsync to sync the encrypted mirror to several offsite hosts. Done. If this level of security matters to you, do it yourself.

I believe you just mixed up MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice in the same lyric joke, which transcends bad to reach the realm of the unforgivable.

Factor in eight decimal places worth of divisibility to that 20 million limit. I hope you understand why that's significant.

Sort of like NSA funding?

Why would you host your critical infrastructure on any hosting provider that has only one datacenter? If your stuff can't go down, you need to have it designed to work in a distributed manner and hosted in more than one physical facility. This costs more money, though.

Replying to my own post for one bit of clarification: the VOIP and XMPP aspects may not qualify as completely managed services depending on what you have in mind, but there's nothing stopping you from operating them on otherwise managed infrastructure.

I'm a senior engineer at FireHost, and we can provide managed infrastructure and installation assistance for the things you've listed, complete with managed SSL VPN access for all your employees.

Again, this is an admittedly shameless plug, but it does answer the question.

Trained in first aid? Doing something macho? What a joke. If one of my children were dying and I knew anything resembling proper help were more than ten minutes away, you can bet your ass I'd put her in the car and do whatever was necessary to get her to the nearest hospital or clinic as fast as possible. That would likely include calling emergency services dispatch on the way and asking for an intercept on my route, but again, you can bet I'd be flying for a doctor. You can keep your "I'm trained" attitude, and that's coming from someone who served alongside Navy Corpsmen. They'd give you exactly the same response in a grievous situation: don't play doctor, do what you can to initially stabilize a life-threatening condition within reason if that means throwing someone else in the car to attempt to stem severe bleeding and/or administer CPR en route, and get to a physician as fast as possible. That last part doesn't include waiting around for an ambulance in severe situations. The one exception I would make to this would be any case involving a potential spinal injury, in which case the victim should not be moved unless the alternative is certain death from other factors.

I've got mod points, and I was gonna mod sI4shd0rk's comment "Interesting", but instead I'll put a note here for the benefit of others that I must admit I find your comment rather sexy as well.

Blackwater changed their name quite some time ago, first to another variant of Blackwater, then to Xe Services, and most recently to Academi. Their security forces are largely comprised of prior special forces operatives, and they are some of the best on the planet in terms of military operations. I'd wager if push came to shove, they'd be more effective than you think against any single army out of the lower 2/3 standing forces on the planet.

In reality, the favored approach is simply to find a force that doesn't like the force you oppose (for whatever reason), and send in folks from Academi to manage their combat operations and make financial deals with them. You lose a whole lot fewer operatives that way, and all it takes is money to make your goals a reality. Large "strategic risk management" firms are better poised than ever to conduct such operations, and those capabilities are indeed growing over time.

I'm former Navy, and I know guys doing these gigs. This is the modern expression and expansion of the age-old mercenary concept, only with more corporate boardrooms involved.

Grammars evolve. We certainly don't speak Old English anymore. In English grammar, one attribute of nouns is countability; this is to say that nouns are classified as countable or uncountable. While American English strongly tends toward classification of "software" as an uncountable noun, this is not necessarily the case for the rest of the English-speaking world, and the trend in many regions is toward considering the word countable.

Having grown up in the United States, hearing the phrase "a software" bothered me until a few years ago. However, I'm no longer particularly annoyed by the phrase, and tend to simply use it as a linguistic hint that the speaker is likely not from the United States.

Given that some viruses infect bacteria and alter their genetic profiles, sure, some of that is possible.

That's why I always encrypt to myself as well as the recipient. It's not difficult.