* Start-up WebLOQ is one of the top security companies to watch
Securing the whole of the Internet is a pretty tall order, indeed. But a messaging security start-up called WebLOQ (pronounced “lock”), is hoping to chip away at that end one virtual business community at a time.
Pegged this week as one of the top security companies to watch by Network World security beat reporters Ellen Messmer and Cara Garretson, the Monterey, Calif.-based privately held company offers what it calls “a spam-free, cost-effective privacy solution for e-mail correspondence over the public Internet.”
Specifically, WebLOQ’s private communications service establishes Virtual Private Communities (VPC) whose members can send and receive encrypted e-mail, documents and other exchanges safely and without spam and phishing hassles. End users download software compatible with popular e-mail clients, and the underlying service sets up a private domain name for each user and gives them a related e-mail address reserved for private communications with other WebLOQ users.
Messmer and Garretson contend WebLOQ is worth watching because instead of trying to protect communications at the edges of corporate networks, WebLOQ secures the transit channel itself. By having encrypted communications only with other members of a community, users are freed from spam, viruses, phishing, and other e-mail Internet threats.
The downside to this approach is that all parties wanting to correspond securely must be using the service. And seeing as the service was just launched in September and the company only boasts one large customer at the moment, its scalability remains an element to be proven.
In spite of its unorthodox approach, WebLOQ has positioned itself in the mainstream of the messaging security market by listing itself in the Network World Messaging Security Buyer’s Guide. Tap into this guide to get a good comparison between WebLOQ and more than three dozen other messaging security gateway products currently on the market.
