Tales from Startup Alley: Kloudless and Cloud Security

I was in email correspondence with Kloudless CEO Elliot Sun yesterday after he announced the official launch of their APIs from the Battlefield stage. What is Kloudless and what’s the big deal with their APIs. Kloudless is a cloud aggregator platform or perhaps a cloud virtualizer or better yet cloud middleware– pick you metaphor–that brings any-to-any relationships to the cloud world. Need to effortlessly save a Google Drive spreadsheet into Box or MS Word into Drive or sync all your files spread out across different file locker services? Then Kloudless has the beginnings of an answer.

Kloudless has already gotten some heavy coverage in the tech press so they don’t my $.02. But their API announcement raised my privacy hackles. Over on another channel I blog about the major security holes in cloud file locker services. So to introduce an API that would enable enterprise apps to exit data into the cloud is a good strategy for even more leakage of confidential data and corporate IP. Am I missing something?

I got a partial answer from Elliot. The company is–of course–aware of the security issues in their API, and the product map will include a way to give IT admins control over permissions and provisioning. I think he’s talking about some kind of controlled environment–hybrid cloud of sorts.

I’m intrigued and I’m hoping to talk to Elliot tomorrow to learn more.