CTO TAlks

Content Lifecycle Management, and the ability to evolve

As well as primarily solving the problem at hand, a technical solution has to be scalable, portable, applicable, and usable.

The aspect of being able to evolve is also important. Just as a new solution is built on the back of an existing one, we should expect future solutions to be built on top of this one. It’s about avoiding unnecessary work, and avoiding inventing the wheel twice. Most of the time, the ability to evolve is manifested through the simplest design combined with a great conceptual idea. Developing technologies and bringing ideas to life is bound to fail if the ideas aren’t good enough, no matter beautiful the lines of code. This is why it is very important to approach a problem at the conceptual level, before starting off with a prototype.

This is what our Security Engineering Team did when, for the first time, we went to the drawing board to tackle the problems that companies have with Information Leakage. The result didn’t bring out a technical specification, but rather a conceptual manifest. The idea was that information security should be about encapsulation and granularity on top of existing infrastructure. For example, if it was about securing a file, the output was still to be a file once secured, but with its content ciphered. If it were about securing an email, the email would still be shipped in a MIME stream but with its content block encrypted. This would mean that a secured email could be sent to a Gmail account and always reach its recipient with its encrypted content without risk of getting rejected by the Gmail delivery agents; and it would mean that a secured file or folder could be moved safely between computers or platforms and still have the security configurations stored along with it.

Our implementation of these ideas is what is today referred to as SEMX Technologies. SEMX stands for Simple Encryption Methodology X, where the X signals ‘variable’ and serves only as a reminder that its applications can vary. These Content Security Concepts and the SEMX Technologies power the majority of our product line today.

For example, the SEMX implementation for Secured eUSB handles content security by placing content within an encrypted database stored on a USB stick. This is ‘granularity’ and "encapsulation" on top of NTFS or FAT. Content interactions lead to database transactions occurring, in turn creating new revisions of the database. By logging each transaction purpose, we can build the status of a specific revision. Yes, this makes it possible to backtrack and get the actual state of a database at a given time. We can then centralize all this information, and make it auditable for an Enterprise administrator at runtime. Hopefully, you start to get a feeling of what our Content Lifecycle Management process is capable of and how the technical solution evolves when based on a great core concept.

The solution is available today, and might help your company to evolve as well.