Close

FileLocker: Truly secure file collaboration is now a reality.

Truly secure file collaboration is now a reality.

Truly secure file collaboration is now a reality.

 

Let’s face it: exchanging files with someone over the Internet is still a pain to do even though we’re living in the 21st Century. When we have a big PowerPoint or Excel file (or even just some JPGs) that we want to send to somebody, how do we do it? If you are like most people, you just attach it to an email that you are sending to the person and then after you hit “send” you keep your fingers crossed for a moment hoping that the email system won’t come back and tell you that your attachment is too big! If the email gets sent, then you breath a sigh of relief and go on about your business. However, what we tend to forget is that we’ve just bombed the receiver’s inbox with our jumbo email — their email system is going to now tell them that they are out of space!

Yeah, yeah, I know that there are lot of different solutions that have popped up on the Internet in the past few years: Apple iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Dropbox. Some solutions even target business users such as: Box, Egnyte, SafeSync for Business, and Syncplicity Business Edition. However, I’ve got a quick question for you: does your company let you use any of these? I’m willing to bet that the answer is “no”.

If the company that you work for is anything like the companies that I’ve worked for, whenever clever technology solutions show up, the legal department steps in and puts an end to any hopes that you have of making your life better. In terms of sharing files over the Internet, I almost hate to say it, but the lawyers just might be right this time. Putting a file with confidential company or customer information out onto a server that’s located somewhere out there in the “cloud”  just doen’t make good business sense. The risks are too great.

That was until now. There’s a new file transfer service in town called FileLocker and the game just got changed. FileLocker comes from a company called Infrascale who has been around for over a decade offering a backup product called  SOS Online Backup. They’ve now expanded into the world of providing business customers with a secure way to perform cloud syncing in a business setting.

What I like about FileLocker is that they make it easy to get started. FileLocker offers free personal accounts with up to 5GB of storage each for up to five users, for a total of 25GB. For more than five users, it’s $5 per user per month support for six to ten users costs $500 a year—significantly less than Box’s $1,080 a year for six users ($15 per user per month). Unlike Box, thankfully no credit card info is needed to get your free account.

I like to use the FileLocker service to send large files to people that I’m working with. However, it’s also a great tool for collaborating with others while working on a file. In order to make this easy to do, FileLocker supports version control for every files that you use with it. Version control is a strength of FileLocker keeps all versions of your files forever, unless you explicitly delete them. The Web interface lets you make any existing version current; this way, if a collaborator made an edit that was overruled, it would be easy enough to roll back the change. Trust me, this feature alone will save you a lot of grief!

The reason that I’m such a big fan of FileLocker is because of its security features. This is what is going to win the legal department over to your side. FileLocker provides SSL encryption during transfer and 256-bit AES on the cloud servers. What makes FileLocker better than everyone else is that they add encryption prior to upload when you select to use their UltraSafe option.

 

 

5 Users

What all of this means is that you really owe it to yourself to check FileLocker out. With the first 5 users being free, what do you have to lose? Click here to sign up for your first 5 users and get ready to finally solve your problem of how to move and synchronize files over the Internet.