An efficient encryption algorithm based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES) for personal cloud computing environments is presented. The proposed algorithm improves data privacy, security and also encryption speed, compared with the triple DES. The improvement of the proposed algorithm stems from enhanced privacy inherent from the use of spread random interleaver in the place of the known substitution table for initial and final permutations in the DES algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate that the interleaver based DES (I-DES) is found to run faster than the triple DES algorithm and also offer improved security. The proposed algorithm also offers encryption for variable-length data using the Cipher Block Chaining (CBC).