Relatively unknown security software provider Vera soon will be enabling Microsoft customers to automatically protect every file created in Office 365 and stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business.
Working with an installation base that numbers more than 85 million, 3-year-old Vera may soon be a little-known company no longer. Office 365 officially now is Microsoft’s best-selling office-productivity product in the history of the company.
With this new integration, which becomes available this month, Vera will be the only content-agnostic security package that provides zero-click, data-centric security, access control, and audit that works across every major cloud-based and on-premises collaboration and storage platforms—including Microsoft, Box, and Dropbox.
This is because the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has built key business relationships during its startup years and is now putting them into action.
Automates Security Across Platforms
More than 85 million users rely on Microsoft Office 365 every month to create and share files in OneDrive and SharePoint, but many enterprises still lack the most basic tools to monitor, track, and control how data is used as it moves through the cloud, Vera said. Gartner Research recently predicted that in the next two years more than 40 percent of Office 365 deployments will require these capabilities.
In contrast to Microsoft’s limited security features, Vera automates data security across OneDrive and SharePoint, ensures that permissions remain with files regardless of how they’re shared, and enables seamless external collaboration without requiring proprietary software installs, the company said.
The 3-year-old startup, whose product went GA (general availability) in April 2015, literally breaks down IT security to its most basic component: the protection of each file individually by putting it into a secure wrapper. No matter where the file goes, it cannot be viewed by a hacker inside any IT system without the key for the file.
Yet, Vera is not exclusively about protecting individual files; the software provides a way for users to protect all their digital content wherever it is moved.
Key features in Vera for Microsoft include the ability to:
—Automate security in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. Automatically encrypt, track and control access to content uploaded to OneDrive and SharePoint, with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Security teams can use Vera’s smart policy engine to create custom rules to grant access to Active Directory or SharePoint Groups, enable secure external collaboration, and enforce usage policies for classified content.
—Protect any content, anywhere, across platforms. As a content-agnostic platform, Vera secures any type of file with zero friction to end-users or forced proprietary plug-ins. Vera’s dynamic data protection ensures confidential content remains protected through its entire life cycle and gives security teams the tools to audit and revoke access rights at the click of a button, even after content is downloaded to a local device.
—Secure and prevent data loss in all Office file types, including Visio. Vera now provides full dynamic data protection for Visio files, giving businesses the ability to prevent data loss from sensitive workflow, process, and operational diagrams. Unlike the Microsoft Azure Information Protection suite, which only protects static, PDF-based versions of these documents, Vera allows organizations to dynamically control editing, copy/paste, printing, watermarking, and even restrict screenshots of these files, in real-time.
Vera, which means “truth” in Latin and is the core of the term “verify,” ostensibly is providing a promising new data- and file-centric security that may be able to succeed where conventional IT network security leaves off, CEO and founder Ajay Arora told eWEEK.
Vera has experienced solid growth since its launch, adding more than 300,000 users at Fortune 500 companies in the financial services, media and entertainment, manufacturing, and technology sectors.
Vera also has partnered with industry leaders, such as Dropbox, Okta, and Centrify, and announced strategic integrations with Box and VMware within the last 18 months.
A public preview of the Vera for Microsoft integration is currently available to Vera customers, and these integrations will be made generally available early in 2017.
To schedule a demo or for more information on Vera’s integration with Office 365, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint, go here.
