Seclore indicated that it is also seeing significant momentum from its recent OEM deal with Citrix, by which it provides the Information Rights Management technology for the Citrix ShareFile sync and share system.
Vishal Gupta, Seclore’s CEO.
Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) vendor Seclore has enhanced the security features in its Seclore EDRM solution. The new release also improves the product’s ease of use.
Seclore’s corporate offices are in Mumbai, India, with US offices in Sunnyvale and New York City. Their focus is on protecting data during the collaboration process by providing very granular controls down to the level of a Word or spreadsheet file. Policies can be automated or set by a document’s owner, and control who can open it and what they can do with it. The document owner can revoke the rights at any time, even after it has left the company premises. External users can also access a protected document easily through a browser, without having to download anything.
Seclore has had important vendor partnerships, including IBM, Symantec and Intel Security, but in May they entered into their most important one yet. They signed an OEM deal with Citrix in which Seclore provides the Information Rights Management technology for Citrix ShareFile, a security feature ShareFile had not previously had.
“In the last 60 days, since the combined product with Citrix was released, we’ve seen a tremendous response,” said Vishal Gupta, Seclore’s Founder and CEO. “The combined system is now live in nearly 70 Citrix customers.”
The new release of Seclore’s product being announced now is all about enhancing granularity to improve security, particularly those relating to other collaboration systems.
“Previously, you could define a policy, but if you inherited policies from say, Citrix ShareFile or Box, there was less granularity,” Gupta said. “We now allow defining full granularity even on policies from these other collaboration systems.”
One net-new feature is Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) capability. This gives customers more flexibility by letting them align Seclore’s key exchange mechanism with their overall cryptographic key management and security strategy.
“This was largely driven by customers like aviation equipment manufacturers, who are very sensitive to local geographic regulations,” Gupta stated. “BYOK also isn’t just a software key, but allows physical Hardware Security Module management systems to be used as well.”
Another net-new addition is two-factor authentication for server-to-server communication.
“We have a lot of APIs by which third party systems like document management or sync and share vendors communicate with us,” Gupta said. “Before, there was always a possibility of compromising the API protocol. With the addition of two-factor authentication, server-to-server communication can be locked down.”
Seclore has also added another security layer within SSL tunnels.
“SSL is not a completely foolproof system,” Gupta said. “Information rights management is increasingly becoming a mission-critical system, so we are adding another security layer on top of that which SSL already provides.”
An enhanced feature is the extension of watermarking, which renders every document with a dynamic, user-specific watermark to reduce the risk of data leakage, to all Seclore clients.
“Previously, watermarking was only applicable to mobile clients, and now we have extended it to desktops as well, Gupta indicated.
Seclore also announced several ease of use enhancements.
With next-generation policy federation, parameters like file owner, classification, and watermark content can now be federated from an integrated application, for tighter integration.
“This really makes things more end-user friendly because end users can do this, not just system admins,” Gupta said. “Users find its three or four clicks at the most before they can protect a report. We find this is the single biggest thing driving a lot of adoptions.”
Other improvements include Email Protector Auto Discovery, where the new user interface provides a quick illustration of how to use the Seclore Email Protector – and why. The idea is to reduce the need for user training and increases adoption. A new File Protection User Interface makes searching and adding users much easier with the addition of intelligent, ‘autofill’ suggestions based on user inputs. In addition, all image formats are supported in Seclore Lite Online, the secure online portal for accessing protected files in any browser. Finally, full Policy Federation capabilities have been added for Microsoft SharePoint, so that granting or revoking permissions in SharePoint will now be enforced even on previously downloaded files.
