Box just made its first acquisition since going public, and the target is health care and financial services
The buy will help Box as it tries to reach bigger companies in industries where security is particularly important, like health care and financial services. Last week, Box rolled out a new package of services specifically for the financial services industry.
Subspace's product lets IT administrators set permissions on who can access apps, services, and data across devices. This is a hard challenge when your phone, tablet, refrigerator, Tesla, and Oculus Rift will all be able to access the network from different places at different times from across the world - not just your own office.
"In these situations, no matter where data travels, and what device it ends up on, enterprises need to be able to control the access permissions and security around it," writes Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie in the official blog post.
Where the seven-person Subspace fits in, Levie writes, is with containerized browser technology. That's a fancy way of saying that if somebody outside of your own Box installation clicks a link to a file, for example a PDF, it can load in a secure, encrypted browser that makes sure nobody is seeing it other than the person who needs to. This is especially a good idea for customers in the health industry, where the HIPAA standard means you're not supposed to access data from an unencrypted device. A secure browser that automatically loads can meet those requirements without requiring a user to do anything special.
Box has invested in so-called information rights management significantly in the last year, making sure that data on its platform can be securely shared with tools like watermarking, audit logs, and even a partnership with Amazon Web Services for key storage.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.