Box Buys Airpost, a Startup that Brings Visibility into Corporate Clouds

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Cloud storage and collaboration platform Box has bought Airpost, a startup whose service allows organizations to know what cloud services their employees are using, and apply full management and reporting to them, making them safer.

According to a blog post from Airpost co-founder and CEO Navid Nathoo, Airpost will be closing operations as of Mar. 1, 2015. The Airpost team will be joining Box, and, as TechCrunch notes, the wording of Nathoo’s announcement makes the deal seem like an “acqui-hire.”

Nathoo wrote, “We are excited to bring our experiences from Airpost to Box and continue to build world-class products so organizations all over the world can feel secure that their content is safe in the cloud, and that their employees will be more productive than ever before.”

Airpost was founded two years ago, and attempted to deal with the issue of “shadow IT” – essentially staff members using outside cloud services (such as Box) without administrators knowing.

Security is obviously a major concern for enterprises seeking cloud solutions, and it’s been an area of competition in the cloud storage and collaboration space, where the major players are Dropbox, Microsoft and Box. Security is, for instance, a major focus of the alternative cloud platform Huddle, and Peer-2-Peer-based offerings such asBitTorrent Sync and Mega also offer some interesting security features.

Meanwhile, Box launched a long-delayed Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange last month, and it has been making a concerted effort towards growing its enterprise customer base partly through the addition of new features. Just prior to the IPO, it had bought CloudOn, a startup that provides cloud-based productivity applications that can be accessed on any device.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/box-buys-airpost-startup-brings-visibility-corporate-clouds