Columbia Records wants to store classified information in Box using security add-ons
US record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment wants to create a more secure version of Box's cloud storage platform
Columbia Records, the US record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, is working on a solution with cloud storage vendor Box that would enable it to store classified information in the cloud.
According to Kevin Murray, vice-president of digital production at Columbia Records, the company adopted Box several years ago as its file storage solution, because it wanted an easy-to-use product with better functionality than its old solution.
"When I first came to the company we were using old architecture including internal file servers, which were not very well organised, not very secure and did not allow for optimal sharing of information from all areas of the business," he told Computing.
"Our aim is to test new technologies and bring them into Sony. The advantage we have is that we can get over the hurdles of legal issues and security policies and test these solutions out," he said.
"One of the difficulties of being a big organisation is that Sony has a very complex vetting system; the IT department already has solutions and so a department has to justify that it doesn't duplicate something we already have in our IT group," he added.
Murray suggested that the IT department did not have alternative options that could compete with what Box was offering. He said that his team wanted to deliver a solution that end users could use even if they weren't tech savvy.
"The learning curve for using Box was the easiest, and it was easy to ensure that people were using it correctly and not jeopardising information that is sitting in the cloud," he claimed.
Columbia Records looked at Dropbox, but Murray said that the product didn't have the functionality he was looking for.
He believes that Box has changed the way people work at the company.
"The old school way was to fill an internal file server, piling files on top of files and not being sure of where everything is. Now, we have an effective ability to search through them and organise the information, and they are easy to distribute as well," Murray said.
At the moment the company is using Box for files that exclude private and classified information, but Murray suggested that this will eventually change.