Self-Hosted File Sharing for Resilient Security

Cyber-ransom is a relatively new crime on an organization’s digital shore and it is spreading with great momentum. The hard earned status and value of organizations is getting damaged with these Ransomware cases where the firms are subjected to pay a ransom of millions of dollars to save their data sets. Major Cloud file sharing systems are often used as a source for framing such kind of cyber-attacks. Due to this, CIOs and CSOs are now facing an unprecedented challenge to prevent such dire scenarios from shaping place. To alleviate this concern, Austin, TX based, CodeLathe has conceptualized a dexterous product, FileCloud, a self-hosted system that runs under the business domain either within firewall or in IaaS. “With distributed design architecture and each system serving only the employees and partners of an enterprise, FileCloud remains protected from cyberattacks,” says Madhan Kanagavel, Founder and CEO, CodeLathe. FileCloud is a cost-effective tool, which provides customer-managed, site-specific encryption keys to encode an employee’s data. “The details of the encryption key are not carried by FileCloud, unlike Public Cloud products like Dropbox or Google Drive,” adds Kanagavel. FileCloud is available through 65 IT managed service providers across 32 countries.

FileCloud works as a Self-Hosted Dropbox where customers can use their own computing and storage infrastructure. Most organizations have terabytes of data stored and distributed across many on-premises file servers. This makes the migration to the public Cloud an impossible task due to factors such as nature of data, data ownership, and size of the data. “In many cases, organizations don’t even know who owns a particular data set within the organization,” says Kanagavel. FileCloud is ideal for such firms where the tool can be installed on-premise, and operated with existing file storage systems and permissions. “Organizations don’t need to do expensive migration of files and permissions to public cloud offerings,” adds Kanagavel. FileCloud has been at the forefront to make information available to customers as a valuable source to leverage. “It is very important for organization to have complete, total control over their information and data to compete and sustain,” adds Kanagavel.

Many organizations and institutions like Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have chosen FileCloud over other EFSS products. It is due to the distinguished attributes of FileCloud such as providing complete control and security, compliance to internal data security policies, low pricing, and customer-centric approach. In an implementation highlight of FileCloud, one of the fastest growing advertising agencies, HY Connect knocked the doors of CodeLathe when they were facing challenges in handling high volume information exchange. With high level of data transfer taking place, HY Connect was looking for a platform for streamlining their file sharing and synchronization processes that would serve both their workforce and clients. After using FileCloud, the employees of HY Connect are now able to easily send large files as a unique URL link, and be notified when a colleague or client was downloading the file. The automatic versioning, backup, and recovery facilities in FileCloud enabled HY Connect to keep their files organized and protected. There were no organizational changes to be made, no data to be moved, and no permissions to be reconfigured. With FileCloud, HY Connect was successfully able to use shared permission-based folders and efficiently manage secure access for both employees and customers. One of the main reasons behind the resilience of FileCloud is its winning combination of ease of integration and use, with robust security and comprehensive administration functions, which is directly aligned with business needs of the customers.

Other than FileCloud, CodeLathe has also been a source of acclamation for its ‘Customer Driven Development Methodology’. The company follows a unique development process where senior developers serve as a part of customer support team one week every month. This strategy entrusts exposure to the developers pertaining to the needs and demands of the customers from their product. “This approach has helped us over time to create the right feature sets in our product that is valued by our customers,” says Kanagavel. The designing of the products is supervised in the automated build system equipped with Nessus scanner to identify vulnerabilities in the development processes. Every solution CodeLathe develops is released in the market on a quarterly basis. With constant updates on upgrading features every few months, the company is striving to bring the most adequate processes and framework in place to make their string of products as secure as possible.

“For every organization, information is a valuable asset and that is why we are expanding ourselves in Information Management Business, where security is a first-class citizen,” says Kanagavel. In this light, CodeLathe is soon to launch solutions in virtual data room, digital signature, and documents management space. These tools will be following a lean development methodology to get instant customer feedback, and iterate the product rapidly to get the product-market fit. The company is also planning to expand their footprint in Europe, South East Asia, and MENA regions. “In the days to come, we will continue to deploy our resources to expand our traction in public, defense, and other regulated industrial sectors like healthcare and finance where the security and privacy of data is more critical,” concludes Kanagavel.