From the very beginning, Aprigo has been all about the data. Our vision was to help businesses manage one of the most important assets they have, regardless of where it is. Data is a core business asset because without it, no business can function.
Data Is A Lot Like Money
We often compare business’ data to their financial assets (a.k.a. money). They can’t function without it (pay salaries, pay vendors, invest in R&D, buy inventory, market, promote, etc) and they understand that it needs to be managed:
- How much do we have?
- Where exactly is it?
- What are we doing with it? Is it growing? How fast?
- Who has access to see it, to report on it?
- Who has the authority to use it? How did they gain access?
- Is it being miss-used, stolen, exposed, lost, or tampered with?
- Is it always available to us when we need it?
We built Aprigo NINJA to help small and mid-sized businesses gain enterprise controls over their data, without breaking the bank, and without other IT resource investments. Software-as-a-Service, installation in minutes, and immediate value. Since our first release in late 2009, we’ve partnered with thousands of businesses to help them better manage the costs and risks associated with their business data on-premise (on their laptops, desktops, file-servers, NAS devices, on their network).
Our vision was to enable IT to answer the important business questions they were being asked when it came to their data, without getting bogged down in the speeds, feeds, specs, configurations, and other non-relevant attributes of the devices on which the data resides. All those devices are replaceable, the data isn’t. We set out to build a single-pane view of all the business’ data that was device and location agnostic. In mid-2010 we extended this by adding in the ability to include cloud based data that resides in Google’s business productivity applications (a.k.a Google Apps and Google Docs), in the form of Aprigo NINJA for Google Docs.
Data Heads To The Cloud
Being a small company has many advantages. We’re fast, nimble, and can truly listen and respond to where the market is going and where customers pains are now and in the near future.
Our customers were telling us that their data was moving almost exclusively to the cloud (Google Apps, Salesforce, ADP, Webex, Microsoft BPOS, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Box.net, dropbox, Jive) and a plethora of other always-on, always available data repositories in the cloud. It’s as if they were telling us that they want their money (read data) stored in Acme Bank’s bank (read cloud vendor), so that they can focus on their own business’ core competencies, and gain enterprise class banking benefits without running their own bank (read manage and use their data, not mange the hardware and software it sits on). It’s still their money, and it still needs to be managed, secured, and used by the business, but the underlying administration is taken care of at a fraction of the cost. Same thing with their data.
Focusing On Cloud Data Protection
After witnessing the overwhelming adoption of cloud data repositories and repeatedly hearing customers say they need enterprise control points to manage their data in the cloud, we made a decision. We have decided to focus exclusively on cloud data protection.
Given our data management heritage, our robust SaaS platform, and experience with thousands of businesses, we feel uniquely positioned to provide the products and solutions customers need to better protect and leverage their data assets in the cloud.
Being a small company also means we have to focus (that’s a good thing, for us, and for our customers) and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ve renamed our product to Aprigo CloudLock, supporting Google Apps today, and many more platforms in the near future. New subscriptions for Aprigo NINJA are no longer available as we pivot our company’s focus to pure cloud.
Aprigo is now a 100% cloud data protection company, from the cloud, to the cloud, and for the cloud.
Free 7-Day trials of Aprigo CloudLock for Google Apps are available on the Google Apps Marketplace.
Update: We’ve also changed our company’s name from Aprigo to CloudLock.
CloudLock For Google Apps helps Google Apps administrators secure access to their Google Docs and Sites. 7 day free trials are available on the Google Apps Marketplace.
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