CipherCloud for Salesforce

The choice of Salesforce is a good starting point for big cloud apps because it is the number three customer relationship management (CRM) product - after SAP and Oracle. 

Hitching its wagon to the Salesforce star was wise as well because Salesforce is touting the "social enterprise" application of social media concepts and techniques to CRM. We can't think of an environment that needs good security more than an application that deals in competitive sales and marketing information in a social network milieu. There really is only one way to feel comfortable about security in this environment - and that is encryption.

The product also provides protection in that it prevents malware from being uploaded to the Salesforce application. Further, organizations developing with an open plug-in framework can develop applications that work with CipherCloud, and there are other uses coming soon, including Gmail and the Amazon cloud.

Overall, this is a unique approach to securing a cloud-based application. While other cloud security products secure the virtual platform - a very good general approach, of course - this one is right at the application layer and it pays dividends in both security and performance. There does not seem to be any performance difference on Salesforce with or without CipherCloud.

This is a simple product to use and it ties tightly into Salesforce - even in its pricing, which is quite reasonable given the added security that it adds to an application handling sensitive data in a difficult environment.