Accellion looks to secure collaboration

Secure file transfer specialist Accellion is set to release a collaboration tool that, the company claimed, would make sharing data much secure.

The company's Secure Collaboration product has been designed to prevent people bringing the likes of Box.com or Dropbox within an enterprise environment, said Paula Skokowski, Accellion's chief marketing officer. “Products like Box.com or Dropbox are great for individual users but they present a nightmare for IT managers,” she said. “It's true that IT managers are able to block employees using products like Dropbox but these do provide a useful tool for people – you want to give them the ability to share documents, just to be able to do it securely. We offer them some control over security anarchy.”

It's also aimed at offering an alternative to products such as Sharepoint and Google Docs which, while offering some functionality have drawbacks that prevent their use within enterprises

Accellion Secure Collaboration provides users with much of the functionality of existing collaboration tools said Skokowski, “it allows users to create shared workspace, allows people to access the information as needed, allows the ability to comment but there's additional security so that you can see exactly who has done what with which document.”

Accellion Secure Collaboration supports both internal and external users.”That gives it an immediate advantage over the likes of Sharepoint which is really for internal users. It is possible to implement Sharepoint for external users, but it's a tricky process, requiring the implementation of different servers,” said Skokowski. “We're not aiming to replace Sharepoint – we offer a Sharepoint plug-in already – but to complement it.”

All users of the collaboration service are authenticated said Skokowski. “Internally, by LDAP and AD; external users have to be invited and then are authenticated the usual way, through passwords. In addition, any file can be encrypted before it's sent and then can be encrypted within the cloud. The tracking and security logs offers a record of what’s going on”

Accellion Secure Collaboration is charged on a per user, per month basis.”It's not easy to give a cost as it depends on the number of users,” said Skokowski, “But to give some typical examples, for 100 users it's $15 per month and for larger numbers it's $1 per month.” The service has some triallists now but will become generally available on 18 April.