CipherCloud opens Sydney office

Says NSA scandal helped drive business.

Ciphercloud has opened its first office in Australia to handle what it says is large local uptake of its services.

The new office of the network encryption vendor will house only two sales staff in the premises but the company planed to expand this with additional "professional services" staff in the near future.

CipherCloud said takeup of its services across Australian and New Zealand was more than double that of the US and Europe, noting that the rise had come from a much smaller base.

Senior vice president Paige Leidig said the uptake was driven in part by the recent NSA surveillance scandals and Australia's pending privacy reforms including mandatory data breach disclosure.

"It is driven by the government's cloud first policy, and secondary by the privacy amendments," Leidig said. "And along with data sovereignty concerns, it has escalated with news around the NSA [scandals]."

Leidig says its customer base has risen from 1.2 million to more than 2 million users since January. The number of records protected during this time rose from 100 million to 250 million.

Local operations, headed by regional director Iman Ghodosi, will focus on the government sector as its top priority, followed by financial services, insurance, heathcare and the retail sector.

Leidig said Ciphercloud was set to introduce a cryptography product to protect on-premise databases which would complement its flagship encryption and tokenisation proxy server cloud offering.