Tresorit was founded ten years ago by three college students in Budapest, Hungary: they have different backgrounds in computer engineering, cryptography and economics. One of them is IstvanLam, the current CEO of Tresorit. He wanted to be a cryptographer since he was 12 years old. At that time, he received a book about passwords from his parents-he was fascinated by cryptographic systems that can hide information. Together with GyorgySzilagyi and SzilveszterSzebeni, co-founders of Tresorit, they hope to create a safe space for their university documents in the cloud. Their main concern is data security. At that time, the use of cloud computing soared. However, the founder of Tresorit believes that mainstream services are inherently insecure because the data stored in them can be easily accessed and scanned. They want to create a safer way to store and * * * share files in the cloud. They have an idea that the most secure encryption type, called end-to-end encryption (E2EE), should be applied to protect the security of data uploaded to the cloud and keep it away from all third parties.
When I was in college with the co-founder of Tresorit, I joined the team in the summer of 20 12 and became one of the first software engineers of Tresorit. I was very excited. We have made great progress in the past ten years. Our first consumer application was launched in 20 13, and our business-oriented service was launched in 20 14. Tresorit has developed into a company with more than 1 10 employees, with offices in Budapest, Zurich and Munich. We are all working for a common task: we want to help people regain control of digital data. I am proud that our service is now used by individuals who care about privacy and teams of all sizes from over 10000 organizations (including small companies, NGOs and enterprises) all over the world. What they have in common is that they attach importance to their own data security and hope to ensure their own information security as much as possible-most of our customers work in strictly regulated industries and must abide by strict data protection standards. 202 1, we launched TresoritContentShield, an enterprise-centered product, which is tailored to the specific needs of large organizations to help them enjoy confidential data outside and achieve the ultimate control and security.
End-to-end encryption is also on the rise: in addition to professional services, technology giants such as Facebook, Google and even Microsoft are now applying it. This proves that our method was correct from the beginning. In 2020, Tresorit became the first end-to-end encrypted SaaS provider to win the Gartner Peer Review Customer Choice Award.
What challenges have you solved for your customers? For our individual users, Tresorit is a privacy-centric alternative for storing, sending and collaborating files in the cloud, and making photos, personal finance or school-related documents on smartphones. For enterprises, Tresorit helps enterprises overcome the challenges related to secure and controlled file management and file transfer within teams and with partners and customers, while complying with data protection regulations. Some use cases include sharing bidding materials with contractors, protecting the security of research documents protected by intellectual property rights during cooperation, and storing personal identification data or medical data of customers.
Tresorit's value proposition combines industry-leading E2EE with extensive data management and control functions to ensure data protection compliance and seamless integration with organizational workflows. Enterprises need both the convenience of cloud and the security of local data storage to operate normally. In the cloud (or static), encryption models (such as the model provided by Dropbox for its customers) cannot meet these two requirements at the same time: they are convenient, but not secure. Tresorit's end-to-end encryption combines the advantages of cloud and local security: it realizes simple implementation, flexibility, accessibility and scalability, as well as the aforementioned security and data control. End-to-end encryption ensures that the control of the encryption key and the data itself remains in the owner's hands.
With the rise of telecommuting caused by COVID-19 epidemic, how can Tresorit support enterprises? Due to this epidemic, organizations rely more on cloud-based services for internal and external collaboration, which means that the demand for security services is also increasing. The workforce has become decentralized, people can now work anywhere, and they need flexible solutions that can be obtained from all platforms. Therefore, enterprise IT needs to support more decentralized infrastructure, which will bring more network security risks-of course, it needs to protect endpoints, but at the same time, there is a huge demand for production tools (such as Tresorit) that are easy to use and maintain and have automatic built-in security guarantees. I expect the trend of telecommuting will continue, which will change the way the company organizes its employees. Once people experience these more flexible working environments, they will be reluctant to return to the "old normal" and mixed systems will prevail. Tresorit supports this transformation through a secure collaboration and file transfer tool that can be accessed from anywhere and provides the same high level of security, no matter where and from what platform (mobile, desktop or web). Another important area in which Tresorit supports companies is inter-organizational collaboration, for example, communication between partners, or financial auditing where auditors need access to confidential data. According to our experience, internal cooperation is more easily guaranteed. However, external collaboration is still a gray area with abundant shadow IT tools. For example, according to a survey of external file transfer in three European countries or recently, 62% of IT decision-makers interviewed said that their organization did not have a comprehensive corporate policy on how to * * * enjoy sensitive data outside the organization.
What makes you different from other similar platforms? The biggest difference of Tresorit lies in our integration and built-in security, which is guaranteed by end-to-end encryption: it automatically works in the background at any time, and our users can easily store, * * * share and collaborate files and apply extended data control functions. From a technical point of view, unlike the server-side encryption adopted by most cloud providers, Tresorit's end-to-end encryption ensures that the control of encryption keys and data is always in the hands of the owner, and no third party can access the data. Only the sender and the receiver can read the file. In addition, technically speaking, it is impossible for anyone, even our own developers, to access these contents.
Basically, Tresorit combines the functions of cloud storage and easy-to-use collaboration, and all the designs take privacy into account, which I am proud of. Tresorit can also be easily integrated into popular workplace tools such as Office365 or GoogleWorkspace/Gmail.
How do you think the recent development around user privacy will affect your enterprise and industry? Since the establishment of Tresorit, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for privacy and security services. In the past year, the epidemic dispersed the labor force, thus promoting economic growth.
When the global blockade began in March 2020, we saw a sharp increase in the demand for Tresorit services and were surprised at the speed at which some companies entered the cloud computing (the decision-making process later slowed down). Companies need to switch to telecommuting almost overnight-this is a challenge for small and medium-sized enterprises (usually without a policy of working from home) and enterprises (without a telecommuting policy that is not suitable for large-scale deployment).
What trends and technologies do you think are particularly interesting now? I find all the research related to encryption particularly interesting. For example, the field of homomorphic encryption has made great progress. This technology will help to solve one of the biggest technical challenges of end-to-end encryption, that is, how to perform operations such as searching or indexing on end-to-end encrypted data. In E2EE applications, these operations are currently impossible, because on the server, we only store encrypted unreadable data. However, homomorphic encryption will enable some functions that we take for granted in non-E2EE applications, such as searching in file contents, which will make E2EE applications more user-friendly.
Another exciting field is quantum cryptography, which will improve the security of public key cryptography, digital signature and key exchange, so they can also resist the next generation of quantum computers that traditional cryptography cannot resist.
How do you look forward to the future of your industry? I predict that data security and privacy will become more important aspects in developing SaaS products. With the increasing demand of customers for data security, suppliers must create products that are as secure as possible, protect users' data privacy, and are easy to use, deploy and integrate into internal workflows. With regard to end-to-end encryption, I expect the adoption in enterprise applications will further increase: because it minimizes the readable data stored on the server sid.