The Prism spying revelations have been good news for this US vendor.
A cold wind blew across cloud software companies and cloud resellers after analyst Edward Snowden first lifted the lid on his former employer, the National Security Agency. The US’s digital espionage department has been constantly in the headlines as its overreach was gradually exposed; for scooping up email addresses and other internet traffic, stealing contact lists and apparently customer data from major cloud providers.
But at least one vendor is cheering. “Before [the NSA revelations], we were reacting to hacking sponsored by the Chinese government,” says Paige Leidig, chief marketing officer for CipherCloud.
“That seems to have fallen out of the front page and every other week we’re hearing about [US surveillance program} Prism and the NSA. It’s helping our business grow like a rocketship.”
CipherCloud is one of several cloud security companies whose fortunes have ballooned on the back of the NSA’s indiscretions. In just a few months CipherCloud claims to have grown from 1.2 million to 2 million customers.
So what exactly does CipherCloud do? Its software, running on a server or a virtual machine in a company’s premises or a hosted data centre, encrypts all traffic to popular cloud services such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and others. The company retains the encryption keys, not CipherCloud, so no-one else is able to decrypt the data.
It seems hard to believe that there would be no impact on performance if data sent to and from a cloud app was passed through an encryption server. Not to mention the challenges of ensuring a cloud app was 100 percent compatible with the encryption.
But Pravin Kothari, founder and chief executive of CipherCloud, claims there is no impact on speed or functionality. “We have ensured that the entire cloud app works,” Kothari says.
CipherCloud doesn’t work with any cloud service. It must be programmed to work with each one, so only the most popular are represented. But it automatically solves the biggest concern companies have about the NSA - that Google, Microsoft and other cloud vendors will hand over their data to government agencies without the user’s knowledge or permission.
US cloud providers will turn over data to the government irrespective of whether the business is American. But there’s no point turning over data that’s unreadable, Leidig says.
“Now the government can’t just go to Google and Microsoft and get the information. They have to go to the business,” Kothari says.
“Our technology allows the customer to hold onto the keys so only they can open the data. In the event that the US government asks for access to that data, the cloud provider can’t turn it over because all they’ll see is gibberish,” Leidig says.
Read More at CRN
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