Virtru, which is best known for its email encryption service for both enterprises and consumers, is announcing a partnership with Google today that will bring the company’s encryption technology to Google Drive.
Only a few years ago, the company was still bolting its solution on top of Gmail without Google’s blessing, but these days, Google is fully on board with Virtru’s plans.
Its new Data Protection for Google Drive extends its service for Gmail to Google’s online file storage service. It ensures that files are encrypted before upload, which ensures the files remain protected, even when they are shared outside of an organization. The customer remains in full control of the encryption keys, so Google, too, has no access to these files, and admins can set and manage access policies by document, folder and team drive.
Virtru’s service uses the Trusted Data Format, an open standard the company’s CTO Will Ackerly developed at the NSA.
While it started as a hack, Virtru is Google’s only data protection partner for G Suite today, and its CEO John Ackerly tells me the company now gets what he and his team are trying to achieve. Indeed, Virtru now has a team of engineers that works with Google. As John Ackerly also noted, GDPR and the renewed discussion around data privacy is helping it gain traction in many businesses, especially in Europe, where the company is opening new offices to support its customers there. In total, about 8,000 organization now use its services.
It’s worth noting that while Virtru is announcing this new Google partnership today, the company also supports email encryption in Microsoft’s Office 365 suite.
