Box‘s new security features may help the cloud storage and collaboration company win over customers in new verticals, including financial services and healthcare.

The team has announced a series of integrations and product updates to coincide with RSA‘s security conference on Feb 28. The overall goal is to help IT departments control a flow of information that isn’t contained within their corporate firewall. If employees are working with partners, for instance, IT should be in a position to decide which information is safe to share.

The Dropbox and Google SkyDrive competitor has ramped up its efforts to sell to businesses (Dropbox is ahead of the pack when it comes to consumers). Enterprise general manager Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck said in an interview that these new products are designed to “answer the call of enterprise customers,” which include Electronic Arts, McCann Worldgroup, NBC Sports, Netflix.

Among Box’s spate of new features, most important is a new control that lets administrators restrict users from creating externally shared folders, which should give IT more control when it comes to sensitive data.

“Content sits at the center of every successful organization and we’ve made it incredibly easy for you to get to that information and collaborate securely from the office, at home or on the road,” said the company’s security lead Joel De la Garza.

For customers on mobile, Box has introduced a new product feature called “device pinning,” which available on the iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. In a nutshell, it lets admins decide which of its customers, partners and colleagues can access Box on their IT-approved phone or tablet device.

Android fans will also experience the benefits of a new integration with Samsung Knox (the company’s recently-launched security software), so Box users can separate personal from professional. Keeping personal data off-limits from IT is a problem that early-stage startups are also working to solve, including Accel-backed MobileSpaces.

Finally, to keep IT departments informed via alerts and analytics, Box has announced an integration with GoodData. If an unusual spike in activity or usage occurs, admins will get an immediate alert and take action.

“The cloud has dramatically reshaped the way CIOs think about data security,” said Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO in a statement (pictured, above). “Rather than ‘protecting’ data by locking down on-premise systems and, in turn, crippling productivity, we’re shifting towards a security model that’s more about monitoring and granular controls at every stage of the content lifecycle.”

Filed under: Big Data, Business, Cloud, Enterprise

Categorised as: Chief Digital Officer | Digital Media | Feedster

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