CipherCloud CEO said the company has opened an Australian office due to accelerated growth in the local market
Cloud encryption provider CipherCloud has seen accelerated growth in the wake of revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden of the massive level of surveillance of Internet traffic by the US National Security Agency, according to the company's CEO, Pravin Kothari.
"We've seen a lot of growth specifically in Q2. When that announcement came out, it was at the beginning of June when Edward Snowden leaked his first piece of information around PRISM and our end of quarter is the end of July," Kothari said. In the wake of Snowden leaking documents that outlined the scope of PRISM, CipherCloud had "the best quarter in our history," Kothari said.
A survey conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) found that 10 per cent of 207 officials at non-US companies cancelled contracts with US-based cloud service providers after Snowden's revelations.
CipherCloud provides an on-premise encryption gateway for enterprises. An enterprise retains control of its encryption keys, and data is encrypted before it's sent to a cloud service provider.
The subscription-based service, which can be installed as a virtual appliance or on hardware, includes plug-ins for a number of major SaaS offerings, including Salesforce, Gmail and Office 365, as well as support for private- and public-cloud-based databases and a framework, Connect AnyApp, that can be used with other third-party or custom applications.
CipherCloud senior vice-president Paige Leidig said that the gateway typically has a performance hit of under 2 per cent, and that in some cases, because of a static object cache incorporated into the gateway, users see better performance from some applications.
Growth in the last quarter was 200 per cent, but CipherCloud's growth in Australia was twice that, according to Kothari.
"I think we'll continue to see a lot of growth globally simply because more and more organisations at the enterprise level are continuing to adopt the cloud for all the advantages that the cloud providers.
"I don't think we're going see any particular area that's not growing, but we are seeing countries, specifically because of this [NSA PRISM] news, in Europe and here in Australia and New Zealand, that are growing very rapidly."
Globally the company's service has around 2 million users and encrypts some 250 million customer records. Customers in Australia include two of the big four banks and a health insurance company. Much of CipherCloud's growth has been in heavily regulated industries, such as banks and other financial services companies, health care and government.
Although CipherCloud has customers in the $250 million-$500 million annual turnover range, most of the company's customers have turnover of over $1 billion.
The company earlier this year established an Australian-based sales operation. "One of the reasons we're setting up shop in Australia is we can't meet demand," Kothari said.
"All the customers we have to date that are live with our product we actually sold through a sales rep based in New York City."
The local office currently comprises two sales reps, but Kothari said based on the level of growth CipherCloud was seeing in Australia it would "absolutely" set up a local customer support operation in the future. (Support is currently provided out of the US and a support centre in India.)
Kothari said that the company sees two future axes of growth for its product offerings. One is increasing the number of cloud-based applications CipherCloud supports 'out of the box' through plug-ins. "The other axis is around different security controls," the CEO said.
"So we provide AES 256 encryption capabilities. We also do tokenisation, we also do key management, we also do Cloud DLP or data-loss prevention, malware detection and activity monitoring. And you'll see us continue to grow along that dimension as well."
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