SearchYourCloud Update: On The Threshold – Issues In The Future of Search

When we spoke with Simon Bain CEO of SearchYourCloud (“SYC”) in early 2014 the company was about to formally announce their product. SYC provides a highly secure search tool that enables companies to search for information that may be dispersed among a variety of sources, such as internal files, emails and clouds, which are not searchable using traditional search tools.

In a recent discussion Bain told us that the company has successfully launched its product. SYC can be embedded within Office 365 or Outlook. It permits highly targeted searches of information in all of the user’s clouds directly from the search function, without having to leave Office 365, for example.

The company recently announced a three-year agreement with PDF Solutions for secure access, searching and sharing on PDF’s SharePoint platform. PDF provides yield improvement technologies and services to IC manufacturers. (SharePoint, developed by Microsoft, is a multipurpose platform for, document and file management, intranet portals. collaboration, and other functions. It is often the tool of choice among closed, secure user groups ranging from boards of directors to other enterprise teams.)

A key selling point for SYC – besides its patented ability to provide targeted searches of vast amounts of data not accessible by the Internet – is their commitment to an extremely high level of security. PDF, SYC’s new client, pointed to this as a key factor in their decision. They stated that their legal department required total security for any data transferred to the cloud. Their IT Director stated, ““SYC has the only platform that offers transparent, secure, file transfer and storage and the ability to use a single query from Outlook to do a deep, simultaneous search of email, desktop, corporate and cloud storage.”

SYC has had a strong focus on marketing in the past several months. While its biggest account currently numbers users (seats) in the hundreds, Bain states that they are on the threshold of orders that could catapult this number into the multi-thousands in the very near future.

The company has emphasized, in addition to certain customers targeted for direct sales, resellers, including Microsoft SharePoint houses. The service is priced on a per seat, per month basis. Its service does not require customization for different clients. As Bain states, “They are paying for security, within Office 365 or a mobile OS, and the security is invisible to the user.”

In our initial post on SYC, we had highlighted the company as an example of how the scope of search could be expanded. (“SearchYourCloud: Expanding The Realm Of Search” 3/28/14). This time we asked Bain about another initiative to expand the scope of search, namely Google’s in-app search capability.

Also referred to as “deep linking” to content within apps, the capability requires App Indexing by the app developer through the use of Google’s “intent filters” that specify how to reach different types of content within the app. Google highlights that Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare are among the featured apps using the capability.

While not totally ruling it out, Bain indicates that SYC is unlikely to move into in-app indexing. He views it as a useful capability for the consumer market. He has concerns about privacy issues. Moreover, SYC is focused on enterprise level customers with a need for reliable security features.

Our take is that SYC is addressing a likely substantial market need among organizations to enable search among their widening sources and repositories of data, while ensuring the highest level of security in a world where information is being seized constantly by mobile devices. While Google must protect its turf in public search, we are especially interested in tracking developments in areas that are not defined by the Internet, but rather by universes of information, clouds and apps belonging to an organization or other group.

Visit their website: www.searchyourcloud.com


Icon made by Vectorgraphit from www.flaticon.com is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Photo by Mical via Flickr