Box Acquires Data Mining Tech From dLoop, Will Target Enterprises With Data Mining

file sync and share technology

Sam Schillace, senior vice president of engineering at Box, said in a blog post, the acquisition, which includes the hiring of dLoop co-founder Divya Jain, aims at providing the Los Altos, Calif.-based storage company's enterprise customers with new security controls for content their users are sending to the cloud.

"(Box is) driving the new definition of security for the enterprise cloud stack and providing our customers with an unmatched level of permissions, visibility and control that they need to embrace the cloud. ... We’re incredibly excited to extend the richness and functionality of Box with new enterprise controls that provide admins even greater safeguards around enterprise content," Schillace wrote.

[Related: EMC Syncplicity Gets Enhanced Security, Policy Control For File Sync And Share Application ]

The dLoop technology creates continuous document graphs and clusters from unstructured content using machine-learning algorithms, Schillace wrote. "This technology helps discover documents that are normally unreachable by search or pattern matching solutions, strengthening cloud security and increasing visibility of high value content. Instead of forcing enterprise admins to rely on easily breakable search strings and regular expressions, Box will automatically locate related content that they need to see," he wrote.

With the dLoop technology, Box appears to be bringing business analytics to data in the cloud, said Rajan Kapoor, CTO of Cartwheel, a New York-based MSP and Box partner.

"Enterprises have unmined, untapped data sets," Kapoor said. "Mining that data, and getting business intelligence out of it, is difficult. Box seems to be trying to help customers get that insight."

For Cartwheel, whose customers are typically businesses with only 50 to 100 users, the opportunities for taking advantage of the dLoop technology with Box is rather limited, Kapoor said. "The target is mainly large enterprises," he said. "Most of my customers are too small. For companies with 50 to 100 users, there's not a lot of data someone couldn't mine just by talking to the person sitting behind them."

PUBLISHED DEC. 2, 2013