Gary Blum, president and chief operating officer of the advertising agency TLG7, was tired of emailing ad designs to clients only to see the ads spring up on the Web without his approval.
When Blum found that there was no web-based service targeted specifically at protecting emails and attachments, he decided to have one designed himself.
On Monday Oct. 17, IPTLOCK ”“ a cloud-based email protection service ”“ launched, marking the culmination of two and a half years of programming and design work by Blum and his associates.
Whereas the average email user has no control over whether a recipient forwards, prints or saves a file that is attached to an email, IPTLOCK enables users to control all of the above. Someone who sends a file with IPTLOCK can even recall an email or set an attached file to a timer, so that the recipient only has the allotted time to view the document before the web page disappears.
“The essence of what this is about is regaining control,” said Blum, whose company is in the process of moving from Purchase to new offices in White Plains. For companies, “Your intellectual assets are your biggest assets, whether you”™re a small business or a big business.”
Blum said IPTLOCK was designed with small to mid-size businesses and individual consumers in mind. While major corporations are generally able to spend more on Internet security, “For a small business, for the average person, you”™re really left to your own devices.”
He said that two of the most important parts of the project were that IPTLOCK be cloud-based, so as to avoid any software installations, and that it be easy for anyone to use.
“The programming to write this was extremely complicated. The more you try to make something look easy, the more complicated it is,” Blum said, adding that he and the software developers needed to ensure that the program worked on all of the major Internet platforms ”“ such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and others ”“ before it could be declared a success. “Anyone can look at this without going through a manual to figure it out. That was key.”
Bill Abram, founder and president of Pragmatix Inc., an Elmsford-based information technology management company, said that all of the features promised by IPTLOCK would likely have “important practical benefits to a number of businesses.”
Keith Reynolds, managing consultant of Maxim Communications International Ltd., a Fairfield County, Conn.-based communications and technology consultant, said that on first glance IPTLOCK seemed like a “unique” technology.
“For smaller companies and design firms to be able to share concepts and keep them in a controlled environment for sharing, it seems like a pretty innovative idea,” Reynolds said.
However, he said that there is always the risk that someone could take a screen-shot, or digital photo, of what is present on a computer screen at any given time. Additionally, he said that as cloud-computing systems become more widespread, larger corporations may seek to limit employees”™ use of any cloud-based programs while at the workplace.
Currently, IPTLOCK is available only to individual users for a monthly fee, but Blum said that he hopes for the second version of the program to allow larger corporations to utilize its features.
