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US encryption vendor CipherCloud, setup by ArcSight founding VP of engineering Pravin Kothari, is going live with an Australian office to provide professional services to local customers and give sales a kick along.

The company positions itself as allowing companies to resolve the most common concern of moving to cloud computing: control over information stored in the cloud, whether it's simple remote storage, or cloud-based applications.

Speaking to The Register, Kothari said there has been a substantial chilling effect in America and overseas as a result of the continuing NSA scandal. In countries like Australia, Kothari agreed that data sovereignty adds to corporate concerns about the the risk of offshore hosting.

CipherCloud's offering aims to overcome those concerns by either encrypting or tokenising data at the gateway to the enterprise, before it's sent to the cloud. Since data doesn't have to be decrypted at the far end, the keys remain with the customer.

(El Reg notes that if the Snowden claims about how the NSA works are accurate, that merely means that data might be retained in case it can be decrypted in the future. And if your company hosts cloud information in the USA, it might be prudent to ensure that whoever holds the keys doesn't travel there …)

Of course, not everything can go through the crypto engine: for example, a metadata-trawl is going to see source and destination IP addresses, since these can't be encrypted. However, the company says, all the application content that hits its gateway will be protected – including cloud applications like SalesForce (along with a number of other applications that are now partners, covering e-mail, CRM, ERP, and collaboration).

Its environment also covers data loss prevention and malware detection. ®

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