New iOS App Gives ‘Private Cloud’ to iPhone Enterprises

Like a post-PC Paul Revere, the tech world has been screaming ‘The Cloud is Coming! The Cloud is Coming!’ While Apple’s iCloud is seen as the ultimate convenience for consumers, enterprises concerned about security have been tethered to a laptop or desktop. Now a developer has created a free iOS app specifically for business users wanting secure cloud-based file-transfers.

“We use Syncplicity company-wide to make our teams more productive, our data more secure and have saved 70 percent of our IT file management budget in the process,” said Brandon Gage, Senior Vice President of Technology for United Capital.

The new iPhone app eliminates “the need for anyone to email a file just to have smartphone access to it while on the road,” he adds.

To answer enterprise security concerns, the new cloud iPhone app provides AES-256 encryption for all data and metadata stored or cached on the Apple handset, as well as that transferred. The app also lets business users cut the link between their handset and their Syncplicity account, allowing any data linked to the service to be remotely wiped.

Answering another security concern for enterprises, the iOS app also offers a powerful versioning ability. If a file is accidentally overwritten, an iPhone or iPad user can roll the file back to a previous version, the change instantly reflected on the corporate file server, as well as SharePoint or Google Docs.

A free 30-day trial Syncplicity Business Edition account is available from the San Francisco, Calif. based company.

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.