Box’s new security features would ‘answer the call’ of large enterprises

Box‘s new security features may help the cloud storage and collaboration company win over customers in new sectors, including financial services and health care.

Box has announced a series of integrations and product updates to coincide with RSA‘s security conference on Thursday. The overall goal is to help IT departments control a flow of information that isn’t contained within their corporate firewall. If employees are working with partners, for instance, IT should make the decisions on which information is safe to share.

The Dropbox and Google SkyDrive competitor has increased its efforts to sell to businesses (Dropbox is ahead of the pack when it comes to consumers). Enterprise general manager Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck said in an interview that these new products are designed to “answer the call of enterprise customers,” which include Electronic Arts, McCann Worldgroup, NBC Sports, and Netflix.

Among Box’s spate of new features, most important is a new control that administrators can use to restrict the creation of externally shared folders, which should give IT more control when it comes to sensitive data.

“Content sits at the center of every successful organization, and we’ve made it incredibly easy for you to get to that information and collaborate securely from the office, at home or on the road,” said Box security lead Joel De la Garza.

For customers on mobile, Box has introduced a new product feature called “device pinning,” which is available on the iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 apps. It decides which of customers, partners, and colleagues can access Box on their IT-approved phone or tablet device.

Android fans will also benefit from a new integration with Samsung Knox (the company’s recently launched security software), so Box users can separate personal from professional. Keeping personal data off-limits from IT is a problem that early-stage startups are also working to solve, including Accel-backed MobileSpaces.

Finally, to keep IT departments informed via alerts and analytics, Box has announced an integration with GoodData. If an unusual spike in activity or usage occurs, admins will get an immediate alert and take action.

In a recent interview, Box CEO Aaron Levie (pictured, above) said that roles and responsibilities of the CIO are fundamentally changing. He made the point that the “balkanization of data” by department isn’t enough, and he argued that it will be “all about managing information.”