Box on Tuesday started rolling out a new automated classification feature for Box Shield, its popular content security product. The new feature uses machine learning to automatically scan files as they’re uploaded or edited in Box and apply classification labels.
Box stressed that the feature should better help organizations meet compliance needs, even as employees work remotely through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Remote work has accelerated cloud adoption as businesses seek to enable a distributed workforce and serve their customers digitally,” Box CISO Lakshmi Hanspal said in a statement. “This requires a completely new approach to security and privacy. As more work is done outside office boundaries on both managed and personal devices it is critical to have one source of truth for all of your data in order to meet new regulatory and compliance standards without slowing down business.”
Box Shield, introduced last year, gives Box users natively-integrated threat detection and security controls to protect their content. During the company’s Q1 conference call in May, Box said that Box Shield is the fastest-growing add-on product in the company’s history. The cloud content management company is using add-on products like Box Shield to expand its business with existing customers and land bigger contracts. In the first quarter, nearly 80% of Box’s $100,000-plus deals included at least one add-on product.
With the new classification feature, content is automatically classified based on admin-defined policies. The feature can identify multiple forms of personally identifiable information (PII) within files, such as social security numbers, driver’s licenses, International Bank Account Number (IBAN) codes and International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9/ICD-10) codes. It can also automatically identify custom terms or phrases. It supports the most common unstructured file types in Box, including documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs.
In addition to using automated classification, Box Shield customers can classify files via API, through Box security partners like IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom, McAfee, Netskope, and Microsoft.
