Intralinks offers firms secure file-sharing cloud computing service
March 1, 2012
Collaboration vendor Intralinks has upgraded its service aimed at giving organisations greater control over content sharing in line with corporate security and compliance restrictions, making it an enterprise alternative to services such as Dropbox.
Available now, Intralinks Connect is a cloud computing based service that provides authorised users with access to documents anywhere, at any time, but with role-based access to the information, with an audit trail and optionally backed by multi-factor authentication…
The new service is designed to provide workers with a way of securely sharing information with colleagues both inside their own organisation and with partners and others outside of it.
Similar products have been launched recently by other firms including RES Software and Dropbox itself.
"The problem we are addressing is that employees have become adept at seeking out ways of sharing information using insecure consumer services, and this has been causing IT managers and CIOs sleepless nights," Ian Turner, UK country manager for Intralinks, told V3.
Intralinks Connect allows users to share documents such as CAD files, PDFs and spreadsheets, but an administrator can set policies determining how these can be accessed.
"Access is typically group-based, but on an individual document basis you can specify that a file can only be viewed by this person and not edited or printed, or you can specify that it can only be accessed from the company network and only during working hours," added Turner.
The platform has full audit capability, so that a manager can check the records and see which documents a specific user has accessed and when, right down to which pages they looked at.
Intralinks Connect provides access via its own viewer that runs inside the browser, so customers can even set a policy that prevents information being copied to the clipboard or a screen capture being taken of documents, Turner claimed.
The platform can also be linked to other customer infrastructure such as Microsoft SharePoint, so that documents stored in a SharePoint repository can be shared securely using permissions set by Intralinks Connect.
Turner said that Intralinks can help customers configure their internet gateway so that users attempting to connect to file sharing sites get redirected to the organisation’s Intralinks Connect account instead.
Pricing for Intralinks Connect is based on a per-user per month subscription basis, but varies depending upon the level of integration customers need and whether they require multi-factor authentication.