Vaultize has always been at the forefront of innovation in enterprise file security and secure sharing. We hold our promise of securing data end-to-end – cradle to grave and source to destination – very close to our hearts. This vision is what drives our roadmap and pushes us to continuously update and improve our solutions.
We have been working on some exciting things and wanted to give a preview of some upcoming features. These will be generally available to our customers within the next quarter.
Confirm email recipients and attachments before sending
One of the biggest causes of data loss is people inadvertently sharing the wrong information with the wrong people. We are enhancing our Outlook plug-in so email senders will be able to review and confirm the recipients and attachments before the email is sent. IT administrators will be able to control the confirmation workflow using centralized policies that include blacklisting and whitelisting recipient email addresses and domains, confirmation of attachments and grouping by domains. Administrators will also be able to use our integration with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions (like Symantec, McAfee and ForcePoint/WebSense) to control the workflow based on the content of the attachments. There will be no need to define new DLP rules or policies.
Encryption key management using hardware security modules (HSM)
From day 1, Vaultize has allowed administrators to have full control over the data encryption keys through our data privacy option (DPO). But DPO can break some workflows and make others a little more complex than usual – accessing data without a Vaultize app, for example. Also, some of our customers wanted to go further than DPO and offload the key storage and management to their HSM, which also makes sense for many kinds of compliances. With HSM support, Vaultize never needs to store or even see the encryption keys. After our next major release, Vaultize administrators will be able to hook up their Vaultize server/cloud to HSMs that support PKCS#11 (the industry standard) like Gemalto SafeNet, Thales and Utimaco. For our public cloud customers, we will include support for AWS CloudHSM.
Easy uploading and sharing of folders using HTML5
A lot of Vaultize users want to upload/share folders or even whole trees (containing thousands of files) at a time. We addressed this requirement partially last year with our Secure Java Uploader. Sadly, Java does not run inside all browsers (like Chrome) and sometimes might also encounter setup or permission issues. So, we are coming up with an HTML5-based uploader that will allow easy uploading and sharing of folders, including support for drag-and-drop. With the combination of HTML5 and Java, users would be able to use the browser of their choice to upload thousands of files or folders easily and securely.
Custom group email signatures
Enterprise UIs are all about customizations. We already allow many customizations to the user experience like branding of the Vaultize consoles (admin as well as end-user) and company-wide email signatures. As a next step, we are going to allow individual groups within an enterprise to have custom signatures for emails sent from that group. This is obviously useful from a personalization point-of-view, but is sometimes also important for compliance and internal policies (for example, adding contact info, disclaimers or other legal stuff).
Comprehensive tracking reports
Vaultize offers top of the line tracking and auditing capabilities – administrators can track anything from a file to a shared link to a user. IT can use the Vaultize administration console or scheduled reports to get deep and regular insights into their data and users. In our next major release, they will be able to get a comprehensive view into any user’s data and activities and go deeper into the user’s sharing activities, owned files/folders and other external or internal users he or she encountered.
Hierarchical storage management (archival of old data)
Many of our enterprise customers retain their data inside Vaultize servers or our cloud for long durations (sometimes running into years) for compliance reasons. This pushes up the primary storage requirement on the servers, which could turn out to be costly in the long term. Also, over the years, we have observed that almost all our servers tend to have a working set within the terabytes of stored data – usually only a few months in the past. It doesn’t make sense to store all the “aged” data on costly primary storage.
To address these issues, our next release will include hierarchical storage management, sometimes also known as archival, in our server backend. Vaultize administrator would be able to configure archival policies that define the age of the data to be moved and also the archival storage itself. We’ll support many types of archival storage including cloud storage services like AWS (S3 & Glacier), Google, Azure and Rackspace, object storage like OpenStack Swift, and even NAS/file shares. The archival process will be completely transparent to the users and all they will notice is probably some delay in downloading old data.
Additional compliance-friendly sharing features
Developing powerful yet flexible policies that help IT achieve compliance is one of the mainstays at Vaultize. We are going to extend that power and flexibility further. Administrators will be able to control (and even mandate) things like subject line of shared emails (for example, to include a docket or case number), the content of the message sent to recipients while sharing and the expiry of shared data. These capabilities will allow organizations to keep things compliant with their information and user policies and will also enable better tracking and auditing.
We are excited to launch these features and more. Please let us know if you have any comments or queries.