The bicycle courier has proven amazingly resilient against the arrival of email and cloud storage services such as Dropbox. Nothing beat the security of sending an envelope of paper documents between a company and its client (assuming you could trust the courier, that is).
An app designed in Melbourne hoped to knock the courier off his two-wheeler. At first glance cloud storage app Lockbox seemed like yet another competitor to Dropbox. But there was a crucial difference that made it more secure than anything else on the market, said CEO Peter Long.
Dropbox, Box, Google Apps, SkyDrive and most other cloud storage apps operated like a centralised server. These cloud programs gave people access to documents sitting on the cloud server which made it easy to share information. However, while administrators at those cloud storage providers were subjected to security vetting and strict protocol, they also had access to the information too.
“Dropbox says we will protect the pipe leading up to our fortress data centre and we’ll have security clearances for staff. But some guy can still wander around that data centre and find that stuff because at the end of the day it’s a ‘trust me’ model,” Long said.
Companies were also concerned about the risk of secret subpoenas served by Australian and US governments to cloud storage companies to access sensitive documents.
Lockbox removed these risks by encrypting files before storing them in its servers. Lockbox’s administrators still have access to the files but they have no way of reading them because the encryption keys are stored by the users.
“Financial advisers in today’s world don’t want to invest heavily in technology. As a consequence they do things in a very manual way – they use bike couriers to deliver sensitive documents, for example,” said Nathan Brumby, Lockbox’s vice president of sales.
“A medium-sized accounting firm doesn’t have to do that anymore. You can have a fully private and secure relationship with a client, you can send a BAS statement in real time because there’s no middleman,” Brumby said.
Lockbox has 5,000 users and was launching in the US today. It also released a secure client portal for accounting firms which took one line of HTML code to install on a firm’s website. The portal retained the firm’s own brand and clients could download their files from Lockbox by visiting the portal.
“Financial advisers’ clients go to their website for their documents; no more couriers. Most importantly I’m compliant with the regulations over here. I’m not placing at risk my licence and as a consequence my ability to earn income,” Brumby said.
The company was picking up a lot of customers in the US such as engineering companies, accounting firms and mid-level banks, as well as more unorthodox customers, Brumby said. One company used the service to share movie scripts it didn’t want leaked.
Earlier this month Lockbox won a deal with a national accounting firm in Australia which would put 500 users this year and potentially double that number next year.
Lockbox’s technology was invented by “world-class” cryptographers in Melbourne and covered by several patents, Long said. The encryption process involved a hierarchy of encryption keys which encrypted other sets of keys. The approach meant it was possible to add or remove users to a document without having to re-encrypt the document, Long said.
Image credit: LockBox