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Securing our digital lives used to be simpler. Up until a few years ago, we primarily used email as a means for transferring or exchanging files between two parties. A handful of companies emerged to provide email encryption for those who needed it. Most other people did not worry about it.

Today, file exchange has gone beyond email. Users regularly transfer important and sensitive business and personal information using a variety of applications. It takes only a few button clicks to transfer files using Dropbox or Box. People regularly exchange files via instant messengers like Skype, Whatsapp, or Gtalk. Employees log into cloud service providers such as Salesforce and click on icons to send out invoices, proposals, quotations, and the like. Security online is no longer simple and there are many more threats to worry about.

Enterprises have lost millions of records and files while Edward Snowden has proved that there is no such thing as security, privacy, or secrecy when it comes to the exchange of information on the Internet. When an enterprise’s shared information falls into the wrong hands, the data leak can help competitors and lead to compliance and regulatory violations. For individuals, compromised data can result in identify theft and loss of privacy. In both cases, there can be significant financial costs arising from security breaches for companies and individuals.

Even as the security risks have increased, users’ expectations for on-demand access and ease of use has increased. The current generation of users expects any kind of functionality in a few button clicks. It is close to impossible to make all employees in an organization experts on file security – and it is a technology and productivity nightmare to ask them to provision users/keys, encrypt files, and only transfer them securely via IT-approved applications.

LockThat’s our inspiration for creating SecurelyShare.com. We encrypt everything before it is shared with others so that only authorized people can open it. SecurelyShare enables files to be tracked every time someone tries to access them. Policies can be changed dynamically and the files can be expired or access can be revoked at any time. All of these security features are as simple as clicking the SecurelyShare button.

We see Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and other buttons in many web pages. We see the “share” button in many applications. Users understand the functionality of these buttons. There is no learning curve. Our objective behind SecurelyShare is the same.

SecurelyShare offers a uniform file security experience across any application or platform where file transfer is possible. For a wider adoption, it is absolutely critical that the user experience is simple and uniform regardless of how the files are transferred. We designed the SecurelyShare platform to be as simple for the users as clicking “share.” That simplicity ensures that adoption of file security is easy to use without any additional effort or learning curve.

Unless SecurelyShare interoperates with multiple systems it will be difficult to make it universal. So we ensure that we support ANY application, ANY context, ANY content, ANY recipient, ANY authentication source, ANY transport delivery, and ANY platform.

Currently SecurelyShare integration is available for Outlook, Exchange server, Zimbra, Sendmail, Postfix, Box, Dropbox, Gdrive, and Onedrive. Integrations are on the way for Office 365 applications, Salesforce, Sharepoint, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Liferay, Jabber, Skype, Open Social, and Webex, amongst other applications.

When we talk about SecurelyShare to customers, partners, and encryption specialists, we always get asked the question: “Why hasn’t someone else built this already? The need looks obvious, the name SecurelyShare looks obvious, the icon looks obvious, why hasn’t anyone brought this level of ease of use?”

The answer is that simplicity is actually very difficult — especially when it comes to security. Security and convenience, in the traditional sense, are inversely proportional. But SecurelyShare breaks that traditional thinking.

We want SecurelyShare to be the first application to provide a UNIFORM FILE SECURITY experience, enabling easy file sharing across any and all applications, platforms, and apps in both the corporate and professional settings as well as for users at home – and we want it to be as easy as clicking a button. Our goal, in other words, is to make securing our digital lives safer and simpler than ever before.



Authors

Prakash Baskaran

Founder & CEO of Pawaa