Dive Brief:
- Box, Inc. on Thursday announced Box for Government, which allows government agencies to deploy the company's enterprise content management platform.
- Though some government agencies already use Box, the new service meets federal security and compliance standards.
- Box also works with IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce.com, among other companies, to offer end-to-end compliance for customer cloud content.
Dive Insight:
By working to meet federal compliance and security standards, Box is opening itself to a huge new potential client base. By meeting FedRAMP compliance standards, Box for Government falls in line with a standardized approach to security meant to help ease the minds of agency CIOs and other concerned parties. The standards work to facilitate cloud adoption and boost confidence in security.
But shifting storage from legacy systems to the cloud can prove difficult, particularly at large organizations. In an effort to ease adoption, Box for Government offer pre-packaged consulting partnerships. This news comes on the heels of Box's recent partnership with Cognizant on industry-specific cloud migration services.
"That way you know that the people who are implementing it know this stuff really well, they've done it before and they're actually doing it in a way that's compliant," said Sonny Hashmi, managing director of global government at Box, in an interview with CIO Dive. "And they're going to leave. There is no motivation for the to stay for the next five years."
One of the main benefits of solutions like Box is that they make it easier to work outside of the office. For government agencies in particular, this poses distinct security challenges for ensuring sensitive information stays safe.
"We believe that the firewall is dead," Hashmi said. "Because the firewall is dead and systems haven't kept up, they actually don't have good clean solutions to allow people to be secure outside the firewall."
