CloudLock Brings PCI Compliance Scan to Google Drive

CloudLock will announce its pattern matching engine for Google Apps customers on Tuesday, bringing Payment Card Industry (PCI) and other compliance requirements to Google Drive.
Available as a cloud service, the company’s engine “identifies, classifies, and secures very sensitive information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Payment Card Industry (PCI) data and custom regular expressions…,” it said in a statement. CloudLock’s PII and PCI Compliance Scan identifies files containing Social Security numbers and credit card information, as well as product SKUs and postal codes.
“As more companies move to the cloud, more sensitive data follows, including PII and PCI data that is subject to auditing and compliance requirements,” said Gil Zimmermann, CEO and co-founder of CloudLock. “Customers now have a way to implement and enforce Acceptable Usage Policies; whether that entails securing sensitive data or preventing its dissemination to certain applications and users in the first place.”
CloudLock said the features in the new compliance scans came from customer requests. One such company, AMAG Pharmaceuticals, touts how the service keeps them on the right side of the law. Nathan McBride, vice president of IT at AMAG, said in a statement: “As a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, we face the challenge of complying with SOX and FDA regulations as well as protecting our IP. With CloudLock’s pattern matching engine, we’re able to identify PII as well as very sensitive data related to our intellectual property…”
Other customers were looking to allow cloud-based collaboration for staff, but still keep personally identifiable information out of the public domain.
Joe Fuller, VP/CIO, Dominion Enterprises, said, “We wanted to make things easier but we didn’t want our sensitive data being compromised. CloudLock gives the visibility we need to identify, classify, monitor and eliminate any employee’s risky sharing behavior in the Google Apps cloud.”

http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/06/cloudlock/

Cloud storage: How useful is Google Drive?

Did you know that you store a lot of your personal and official information on a cloud? Where do you think all the attachments in your web mail accounts are stored? However, when it comes to consciously storing data and accessing it, most of us prefer a USB flash drive or, if the data is sizeable, a portable hard disk drive (HDD). Now, Google Drive aims to change this since it is not just a warehouse, but also offers a bunch of applications.

Google Drive to get offline mode in five weeks

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome and Apps at Google, stated that the Google Drive will get offline mode in five weeks.
On the sidelines of the D10 Technology summit, Pichai told 'All Things D' author Walt Mossberg that Google's online storage service (Drive) will get offline support in five weeks from now. That means we can anticipate the offline mode in the first week of July.
Google Drive is one of the online storage service based on cloud servers, allowing users to upload content anywhere through web or dedicated apps meant for PC and mobiles. Though Google Drive may appear bit less glamorous than other online storage services, the company plans to bring offline storage for the same.

The Google Docs is already slotted under the Google Drive umbrella and already offered offline support. Now Google Drive will get offline mode after five weeks. Dropbox already offers offline storage and functionality.
Google Drive app is available from Google Play store and also for PC as well as Mac.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/google-drive-to-get-offline-mode-in-five-weeks/263806-11.html

Livedrive CEO Says Paying for Google Drive or SkyDrive is Like Paying Tax

The CEO of Livedrive, one of the leading cloud storage services for consumers and small business, today posted a blog post explaining why he is not worried by competition from Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive. Both services offer cloud storage under a 'freemium' model - meaning that users can use a certain amount for free, and then have to pay if they want extra space. Livedrive has always offered services as a paid for product, with no free tier.
In the blog post, Andrew explains that, "Paid-for services like Livedrive can offer far better deals to paying users because we don’t have the cost of servicing millions of free users. When you have a freemium model you have to set the usage bar for paying quite low to make the numbers work... and the price has to be high because only small percentage of users will chose to pay."
Freemium is a popular marketing technique among web companies - allowing companies to take advantage of the viral and social nature of their large free users bases, with the expectation that some of their free users will become paying customers. Andrew argues that the paying customers of these services are paying far more than they need: "Paying for Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive is like paying tax. Our message is simple – by all means enjoy a free service if it meets your needs, but if you’re going to pay, then come to a paid for service like Livedrive."
Andrew - who previously founded the UK's largest hosting provider, Fasthosts - explains how a similar pattern has been seen in both the internet services and hosting industries. In both of these segments free players dominated the early market, but then as the market matured customers grew used to paying for them. Andrew wrote:
"When I started Fasthosts in 1998 most people thought web hosting would be a free service – the likes of AOL and Geocities were offering free hosting and it wasn’t unusual to find professionals and small businesses alike using them. Then, as the market matured the word on the street was that ‘only prosumers will pay for web hosting’. What actually happened is that as the Internet grew people’s needs grew and users had all sorts of preferences – in the case of web hosting that meant things like support, speed, domain names, server features etc. Now, even a home user who just wants a website to rent out his holiday home will most likely be using a decent, good value, paid for service as opposed to a one size fits all freebie."
Livedrive are an award winning UK-based provider of online backup and cloud storage services, providing solutions for consumers, small business and resellers.
Andrew Michael's full blog post is available here:
http://blog.livedrive.com/2012/06/freemium-vs-paid-a-different-perspective-on-cloud-storage/

PCI compliance scan for Google Drive

CloudLock announced a pattern matching engine that identifies, classifies, and secures sensitive information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), PCI data and custom regular expressions, allowing Google Apps customers to address auditing and compliance requirements in Google Drive.

PII is data that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single individual. CloudLock’s PII and PCI Compliance Scan allows customers to identify files containing Social Security Numbers, Credit Card information as well as any custom patterns/regex that they can define such as Product SKUs, postal codes or any other pattern.

“As more companies move to the cloud, more sensitive data follows, including PII and PCI data that is subject to auditing and compliance requirements. With CloudLock’s pattern matching engine, customers can identify data containing PII, classify it as such and take action. Customers now have a way to implement and enforce Acceptable Usage Policies; whether that entails securing sensitive data or preventing its dissemination to certain applications and users in the first place.” said Gil Zimmermann, CEO and Co-founder of CloudLock.

Enterprises handling sensitive data, including personally identifiable information, have a responsibility to protect access to this information regardless of whether the information is kept on-premises or in a cloud-based provider.

Moving to the cloud doesn’t remove this responsibility, nor does it shift it solely to the cloud provider– enterprise security policies must be extended to cloud-based information and we need to be able to show compliance with these policies,” said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=13092