Box beefs up security with acquisition of Subspace

This is Box's first startup purchase since going public in January

Box has just made its first acquisition of 2015 and, more importantly, its first since going public earlier this year.

The cloud storage provider announced that it has purchased Subspace startup that helps IT departments enable employee productivity with secure collaboration and access to data on any device.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but it was revealed that Subspace's entire seven member team, which includes its founders Jon Fan, Ben Kus and Peter Loer, will all be joining Box. Subspace will be shutting down, ceasing operations as of April 3rd of this year. 

At Box, the Subspace team will help extend the security, compliance and control features of Box's content and collaboration platform to any device used to access data, regardless of whether it’s a company or personal device. 

Founded in 2013, Subspace focused on solving the problem of security on BYOD and Cloud Apps. It provided a containerized enterprise ready workspace that enabled true BYOD for laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. That included removes end-user adoption friction while providing enterprise grade security controls.

The two companies share a similar vision, Subspace wrote in a blog post, that "the next generation of enterprise IT products must be designed for both end-user and IT admin usability."  

"We can’t think of a better place to continue to drive that mission forward than at Box, a leader in secure content collaboration for the enterprise.  At Box, the Subspace team and technology will continue to focus on providing enterprises with simple and secure access to company data on any device."

From Box's point of view, Subspace will use its expertise to help secure the company's own security efforts. 

"The proliferation of cloud and mobile technology has produced immensely powerful tools for individuals to do their jobs better. New services are available on-demand and work from every device, making people dramatically more productive and saving significant IT costs in the process. But as enterprises have embraced these technologies, data has become more fragmented across a range of devices, as well as accessed from a variety of networks, making the protection of content exponentially more difficult," Box CEO  Aaron Levie wrote in his own blog post. 

"The Subspace team will let us go even deeper with our security and data policies, enabling reliable corporate security policies, even when content leaves the Box platform to be accessed on a customer or partner's device."

Box ended trading down 1.06% on Tuesday, or $0.20, to $18.59 a share.

(Image source: box.com)