All posts are my own thoughts and not of my employer.

Box has landed in EMEA. Following on from the success of our Box World tour in London we are continuing our European roll out and only this week we put our first foothold in the conference that is Infosec 2013 . This is Europe’s biggest security conference and it feels it. Despite a strike by a major European Carrier there were over 12500 attendees. It was packed with people looking for the latest and greatest in the information security world. From deep packet inspection companies to media disposal and deep space government spin offs offering the latest in cutting edge research.

Box delivers secure content collaboration to office and mobile users. Their is a trend for users to bring in consumer grade tools. They want tools that are easy to use to share information with colleagues or customers and to access that info on their mobile devices be they tablets or smartphones.  IT managers and security officers see this happening and realize it’s a security risk .These consumer grade tools don’t integrate into the corporate infrastructure and don’t have the controls that IT needs to ensure a safe information compliance policy.

This is a typical route to Box at this stage. IT look for a solution that meets enterprise grade security needs but also meets those needs of adoption and ease of use . I had many conversations with companies at Infosec who had precisely this problem. They were tasked with getting secure collaboration for their users.  Either there was a corporate rollout of tablets (iPads), a BYOD program in place or the need to collaborate securely internally or with partners. These are all very common use cases for a Box deployment.  The three top themes for this years CIO’s according to Piper Jaffray are security, tablets and storage.

Box is in the middle of all three and hence of huge interest at Infosec.  Companies coming to the stand were ticking one or all of those boxes. Consumer tools were likened to a ‘virus’ by attendees and IT were looking for a sanctioned alternative and essentially blocking those tools. The other type of attendee we saw was the company working with sensitive company data (new product launches, proprietary IP and the like ) wanting to collaborate securely with partners or customers. DLP (Data Loss Prevention) and secure ‘deal rooms’ were critical for those companies to ensure both safety in transit and also recovery operations on data that was over shared.  One of the things that was most gratifying was also seeing the Box ecosystem present at the Infosec. Partners like Good and Mobile Iron were their from an MDM perspective securing information at the device level , companies like Ciphercloud who’ve built an innovative DLP platform hooking into the Box API and IDP providers like Onelogin that have AD integration and SaaS identity management securing access to Box via corporate logins.   Security is a multi-dimensional challenge and it’s right that Box partners with companies like these to provide a complete end-to-end secure ecosystem for content collaboration and mobile access.

Box Secure Infrastructure

Box has a mature security infrastructure that you would demand from a company with global customers and a plethora of security certifications. Infosec was a great platform to discuss this and the message really resonated . But adoption is important to ensure companies don’t repeat the ECM shelfware of old with complex products preventing users from accessing and interacting with the content.  The other great message at Infosec from Box was this security doesn’t come with a price of usability. Field tested with millions of users Box continually invests in a genuinely fantastic UX (User Experience) which helps adoption and provides an easy to roll out tool.  All in all a great week well spent and plenty more exciting things to discuss in the next few blogs. I thought I’d leave you with these two images I made myself to describe our two user communities.

Users Love Box.

Box gets the ‘Tick’ on IT Requirements