Tresorit, slowly approaching world-fame with ten-thousands of clients and a super-safe sharing software, can devastate the world-market, reports szeretlekmagyaroszag.hu.
Many say that the success of Tresorit resembles that of Prezi or Ustream.
The Hungarian company has an increasing client-base in Europe and in the North-American region, and they are already working on their new product, which would make their encryption technology available to further corporations.
Encrypted Dropbox
Tresorit is a service for sharing and storing files available for both companies and individual users. Today’s cloud services, like Dropbox, give storage space, where you, or even large companies, like MOL or McDonald’s, can store data. An average person may think that it is not so important to keep their data safe from professional hackers (or, at least, would not pay ten-thousands every month to achive such a safety), but it is the experience of Tresorit that, as soon as concrete questions are asked (would you like your private photos to be out on the internet?), the opinion of people suddenly change. Furthermore, it is important for companies to keep certain sensitive data safe for sure.
Dropbox, for example, is not like that. Tresorit found this market gap in the last few years, so they already have more than ten-thousand company and a hundred-thousand individual users today. Tresorit’s structure is based on end-to-end encryption, which means that even they cannot see the files of the users. These files get encrypted on the device of the user, therefore the system is so safe that they actually reward any hackers, who successfully break into the system, with USD 50,000.
From the university to the secret service
The story of Tresorit started at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, in the research centre of the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, where two of the founders, István Lám and Szilveszter Szebeni, worked together. They started developing the encryption system, that gives the basis of Tresorit and the “shareable encryption”, during their BSc, which is already under patent today.
They wanted to share their university notes safely, but they did not trust the popular cloud systems, like Dropbox.
This is where the idea came from, to create their own solution, which is much safer than the well-known services, but still has the comforts offered by the cloud. During the research they found out how the cloud-based data storage can be safe through the use of an end-to-end encryption system. Completed with the third founder, György Szilágyi, who is responsible for product development, they decided that this level of novelty is worth to put on the market. They kept the good relationship with the university; the majority of their programmers studied or are still studying there, the average age at the company is 27.
The company brought up a brilliant idea in 2013. They wanted to prove that their system is unbreakable, so they offered USD 50,000 to the one who can reach a file that is stored in Tresorit.
The speciality of the competition was that the hackers and the experts of system-security were provided with the same administrator-rights that the Supreme System Administrators of Tresorit use.
In more than a year nobody could break the encryption and read the files – although there were attempts by acknowledged institutions, like MIT or Stanford. György Szilágyi was proud to tell:
“We showed that not only hackers with evil intent, or system-security, but even we are unable to reach the files stored in the system. We cannot read them, so, even if we wanted to forward it to the national security in a readable format, we are not able to do so. The essence of Tresorit is, that only the user has the key to access the classified files. Only they can read them and, of course, people they share it with.”
They are mostly targeting Europe, but they are also heading to the States
The encrypted cloud service has a great market in Europe. As György Szilágyi stated,
“Two-thirds of the Tresorit users are European, mostly from German speaking areas (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), where people ad companies are more aware of the importance of data safety.”
He also told:
“Besides them we have an increasing client base in the North-American region. There are many different companies using our file-sharing service, from companies with 5-10 people to larger corporation with hundreds of people. We have more and more clients, big companies, such as IT Services in Hungary (affiliated company of T-Systems)”
There are many consultant companies, financial services, law firms, research centres, educational institutions and marketing groups of bigger companies, among their clients. The mentioned companies are the same, in the sense, because different documents and files, containing confidential data, are playing an important role during work, and they have a significantly large demand related to safety. Tresorit is available in five languages: English, German, Spanish, French and, since September, Hungarian.
“Non-profit organisations are our enhanced users of ours, because the protection of data is a priority for them. The protection of data can be a matter of life and death in the case of organisations helping war victims or protecting human rights. Therefore, we started our non-profit program, to support these groups doing valuable work, and to help them to use Tresorit for free.“
Further big company users and newer products are planned
The aim of Tresorit is to be a determinant part of the enterprise file sync & sharing (EFSS) market, in other words, to work with more enterprises and offer them services to handle company documents safely and comfortably, correspondingly to all the international data protection regulations.
On the other hand, they would like to make other applications dealing with digital data and working “safely”. So they created a new product this year: they started a software developing kit called 0_kit, which has already been successful in Tresorit file sharing; it makes encryption dealing with hundreds of gigabytes of data available for other developers.
“Application developers can easily build it into their own systems, for example, in a corporation-leading system, or in a healthcare mobile application. One of our colleagues, living in San Francisco, is responsible for developing 0_kit, who has been negotiating with several large American companies about collaboration. “ – as it was told by György Szilágyi.
Many compared the story of Tresorit to Prezi, LogMeIn, NNG and Ustream, and there are obvious similarities between Tresorit and these start-ups: all of them are Software-as-a-Service start-ups coming from Hungary, with high-risk investing backgrounds. (Tresorit has involved nearly EUR 5 million value stocks since its establishment.)
“There are more than 55 people working in our Budapest office to develop a cloud-based service appealing for the global market.” – said György Szilágyi, when speaking about their goals.
Photo: szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu
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