Searching in the Cloud is so common it even has even acquired a product name as a verb – to `google’. But while Cloud storage is becoming an important component in the mix of Cloud services used by many companies, it can create something that is not as useful or valuable to a business as its on-premise equivalent.
That, in the opinion of Simon Bain, Chief Technology Officer of Simplexo, is because searching Cloud-stored documents is risky:
Simplexo’s answer is SearchYourCloud, a secure search tool for information held in Cloud portals. According to Bain it is able to keep both user information and the data files totally secure by encrypting everything. As a by-product, however, it also creates a tool whereby users can securely store and access their data – as well as search it – from anywhere there is an internet connection.
Simplexo has created an index with a full level of security of the documents, coupled with full text search of the content of the documents. In does away with the need for separate management of the location and storage of the files themselves, which as Bain acknowledges, solves the most common problem of users forgetting where files have been stored.
The system is able to search not only documents but also emails, PDFs and a wide range other formats without opening up the contents of the index to outside scrutiny. The company is currently running proof of concept demonstrations to potential partners – and it is the channel partner community it is targeting with SearchYourCloud. So for now the index is currently stored on a Simplexo system located on Amazon’s S3 service.
But in practice each individual user will have their own index and document store which is not traceable back to them. This can be located on most storage services. Each client computer – which can be a smartphone as well as a PC - will have a little agent which uploads the files to the index and storage. That is all carried out in background mode, allowing the user to carry on working:
From a basic security point of view this does have the potential to eradicate one of the most common security breaches at a stroke – the loss of a laptop system crammed full of data. Bain uses himself as a working example:
This does run some attendant risks around the issue of assess and availability if access to the internet is difficult, which it still can be, especially for road warriors. Once uploaded however, the data is likely to be far more secure than normal practice would prescribe as sufficient within many businesses.
According to Bain the Simplexo security strategy avoids both the use of policy-based approaches and rafts of anti-virus/anti-malware tools. Instead it is based on making sure there is no unauthorised access to the information held. Only the individual who uploaded the files has access to them.
This does not preclude the ability to establish collaborative workgroups, however, as the individual `owning’ the files can then nominate other users to have access rights to specified files. The stored information is not linked back to the individual, and passwords or email addresses are not stored on the servers.
So if someone did hack the index there would be no information there that related back to a specific document or file. While Simplexo is using Amazon S3 for the proof of concept trials, the system can be used on most available storage services. Should the document storage servers get hacked the encryption level means the documents cannot be traced back to an individual user and each document has its own encryption key.
A big market Bain sees is with the Cloud storage service providers. Most of them, he contends, currently don’t offer users a search capability as part of their service, mainly because of the lack of security available with Cloud search. So the plan is to allow SearchYourCloud to be embedded with other storage services as part of their offerings.
This does offer an interesting compromise for users, in that by cherry picking the combination of encrypted storage and encrypted indexing it allows them to keep much of their original working environment while providing a secure management, storage and search capability that is accessible from anywhere there is an internet connection.
Other solutions, such as Google Apps or Microsoft Azure or Office 365, generally require a much higher level of across-the-board commitment to their services.
To that end I can see this playing well across a range of users, from the individual professional, through to any company that has a large base of valuable IP in its data, coupled with a high demand for searching that data and a need to do just that from anywhere, any time.
