Amazon unveils its newest baby called Amazon Zocalo, which aims to provide utmost security to email inboxes and documents of enterprises and likely a response to controversies surrounding security of email clients these days.
In a blog post, Jeff Barr explains that the company felt that email inboxes are not suitable locations for sharing or reviewing important documents securely and efficiently. Because of this, Amazon decided to develop a hub for documents that would provide relief to the huge load on email inboxes and would organize the process. Besides, its enterprise clients have been urging them to come up with secure sharing and storage system.
"Customers have told us that they’re fed up with the cost, complexity, and performance of their existing old guard enterprise document and collaboration management tools," Noah Eisner, GM at Amazon Zocalo, says in a statement. "AWS was increasingly being asked to provide an enterprise storage and sharing tool that was easy to use, allowed users to quickly collaborate with others, and met the strict security needs of their organizations. That’s what Amazon Zocalo was built to do."
Amazon says Zocalo is a "fully managed, secure document storage and sharing service designed specifically for the needs of the enterprise." It provides enterprises a secure access to its documents, regardless of factors such as device used, user location or official relationship of user with the enterprise.
Being the owner of the document, the user has the option to share the document with others, even to those outside the organization, and to ask for feedback from them. The user can also specify a deadline for the feedback needed.
For security conscious individuals, Zocalo provides administrators the ability to control and examine access to documents and accounts. Documents have a designated storage in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region and are transmitted in an encrypted form. Users have the option to not allow downloading of documents for added protection.
Amazon’s Zocalo can be installed on desktops and laptops running on Mac’s operating system version 10.7 or the latest or Microsoft’s Windows 7. Users can also access Amazon Zocalo from their tablets such as Android, iPad and Kindle fire.
"Once you do so, saving a file to the folder will automatically upload them to Zocalo across an encrypted connection and sync them to your other devices," explains Barr.
Zocalo supports various types of documents and versioned reviews, whether on Office documents, images, text files or PDFs. It works seamlessly with Amazon WorkSpaces. It has memory storage of up to 5GB.
Amazon Zocalo appears to offer storage services similar to Dropbox, Box or Microsoft’s SharePoint Online, which analysts say could amp up the competition among these services.
Box’s chief operating officer Aaron Levie, however, issued a statement regarding the possible competition with Zocalo.
"It's an incredibly exciting time for the cloud content category, and Amazon’s entry underscores the scale of the market opportunity. Amazon Zocalo looks like a useful service for file storage and sharing. At Box, we’re laser focused on offering the security, scalability, collaboration and cross-platform support that enterprises require to be more productive and competitive across workforces of hundreds of thousands of employees," Levi says.
Amazon Zocalo is now available in Northern Virginia, Oregon and Ireland. To have a preview of Zocalo, users may join the Zocalo Limited Preview.
