Aprigo Becomes CloudLock, Goes Full Cloud

In a note to customers, CloudLock CEO and co-founder Gil Zimmerman said the Waltham, Mass.-based company's decision to cut its on-premise product called NINJA was not a decision that was reached lightly, and is not a sign that CloudLock's on-prem offerings were floundering. CloudLock also highlighted the shift to the cloud and the name change in a blog post.

"Interestingly enough, one might think this move is a result of our on-premise product not being successful," Zimmermann wrote. "This could not be further from the truth. In fact, it was painful telling our on-premise customers that the pivot was taking place and we would no longer be offering the on-premise version of our product. They weren't mad at us -- in fact, they were impressed by the professional manner in which we approached it -- but they were upset to lose a product that had in fact been working very well for them in helping maintain a secure data environment while keeping IT costs down."

CloudLock focuses on cloud data protection and enables control of data while leveraging the collaboration and cost savings of the cloud.

The company's products integrate with cloud applications, like Google Apps and soon Microsoft Office 365, to offer visibility and management capabilities. It provides visibility for cloud-based data. With Google, for example, CloudLock's SaaS leverages Google's API, runs on Google App Engine and is part of the Google Apps Marketplace. By collecting meta-data from customer's Google Apps domain, CloudLock offers control into all documents across all users and allows organizations to identify, monitor and protect exposed data; change permissions; migrate data; generate change and history reports; and comply with regulatory compliance and e-discovery requirements.

Zimmermann said in the note that the proliferation of cloud computing prompted the shift for CloudLock.

"What we noticed immediately upon offering an enterprise-grade Google Apps solution (which we began offering in the summer of 2010) was the large number of companies utilizing the cloud as their primary enterprise computing solution," he wrote.

According to Zimmermann, that increase in the use of cloud drove CloudLock to its decision.

"In short, we could not ignore the market potential for CloudLock, so we decided to focus exclusively on a much faster growing, more attractive, compelling, and valuable opportunity that the market was pointing us towards," he wrote to customers. "This is what makes a true pivot difficult. It's having to walk away from something good to pursue something great."