RSA 2012: Sophos And Egnyte Secure Mobile Documents

Sophos and Egnyte are combatting the problem of document security for files used for collaboration through the cloud, by letting Egnyte’s cloud customers use Sophos’ data encryption technology.

Consumerisation of IT means that documents are leaving the protection of a company’s security wall on an increasingly regular basis as collaborative efforts between employees, customers and partners proliferate. Protection for these files is often non-existent and information leakage is a serious danger.

Encryption in motion

The partnership lets Egnyte HybridCloud customers use Sophos SafeGuard Enterprise to create and control their own encryption key to secure designated files. The documents can then be securely accessed from anywhere, at any time, whether behind the firewall or in the cloud. It also imposes a consistent encryption standard.

Egnyte HybridCloud’s file serving service currently houses over a billion files, the company said. The files are stored for sharing or just as a backup archive. IT departments can use its centralised administration and control to enforce business policies.

Vineet Jain, CEO and co-founder of Egnyte, said: “While the cloud opens up many opportunities to collaborate seamlessly, it also presents security issues and uncertainties, especially as employees use personal devices to access company information. What’s unique about our partnership with Sophos is that the combination of our services provides the market with a hybrid-cloud solution that scales up and down as needed, and provides IT managers with ultimate control over their data and the ability to manage encryption keys without additional support.”

Sophos SafeGuard Enterprise is a strong encryption package for protecting computers, their shared folders, removable media and Cloud storage. The company claims that this will stop data breaches and make compliance simpler without getting in the way.

Matthias Pankert, vice president of product management for Data Protection at Sophos, said: “One of the biggest drivers for adoption [of Cloud] is understanding how to carry a security policy from the customer side through to the Cloud provider. As providers like Egnyte develop these abilities, enterprise cloud computing will be utilised even further. An example is true mobility freedom – the concept that smartphones and tablets become viable equals to the laptop or desktop.”

Ownership of the encryption keys is an essential part of enterprise security policies and protection, Egnyte claimed. As documents are accessed from the Cloud, they cannot be read should they be intercepted and can only be used by the intended recipient.

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