Andrew Klein - Senior Product Marketing Manager
Last week, we held a webcast on File Protection. Here’s a link to the replay [registration required]. There were many great questions, so I took a few minutes to summarize the questions and post the answers.
Q: Does PGP® NetShare do anything special to protect files against unauthorized file deletion, especially for client machines that do not have the PGP® NetShare client software installed?
A: PGP® NetShare is concerned with protecting the contents of a file. It does not protect users from deleting a file they have permission to delete.
Q: What offering is there for Open Documents Formats on non-Windows platforms?
A: PGP® NetShare is a client-based product which runs on Windows systems (check out supported platforms here), but it can protect files created/saved in Open Document Format. PGP® NetShare does not have any restrictions on document format or file type.
Q: How do you integrate your solution with SharePoint?
A: SharePoint helps organize and control access to files and folders. PGP® NetShare integrates with SharePoint through the WebDAV interface supported by SharePoint. When SharePoint utilizes the WebDAV mechanism to access files, such as in Explorer view, PGP® NetShare can enforce encryption policies on the files and folders being accessed. For more information on how SharePoint and PGP® NetShare work please refer to this PGP Knowledgebase article.
Q: How does a customer decrypt the file without needing a password / software? How does that not compromise security? What will prevent someone other than a customer not do same?
A: To decrypt a file a passphrase (or similar access mechanism) is always required. Depending on whether or not the receiver has PGP® NetShare installed, will define how they obtain that passphrase from the sender. Learn more about PGP® NetShare here.
Q: How does NetShare relate to the PGP® Virtual Disk product?
A: PGP® NetShare is designed to easily work with shared files, typically those on a file server which are accessed by multiple users. Encryption follows the file or folder so if that file or folder is moved to another location it will remain encrypted. PGP® Virtual Disk can partition a portion of a given user’s file system as a virtual disk and then encrypt all the contents (files and folders) of that virtual disk. This is useful when an individual user needs to protect certain files on their system without encrypting the entire drive.
Q: Any roadmap for NetShare for Mac clients or for Mac servers?
A: PGP® NetShare is client-based software which operates on Windows systems (check out supported systems here). Support for Mac clients is on our request list, but we have no announcements to make at this time. Support for Mac servers is under investigation.
Q: How do you manage external contractors/organizations to access designated documents?
A: Users who can encrypt/decrypt a network file share (folder or file) using PGP® NetShare are specified by the administrator. Assuming PGP® NetShare is managed by PGP Universal™ Server, valid users can be obtained from single or multiple LDAP systems, or added directly by the administrator. If PGP® NetShare is not managed by PGP Universal™ Server, then all users are added directly by the administrator. Learn more about PGP Universal Server.
Q: How does PGP® NetShare support unix/linux shared directories (i.e. over NFS)?
A: PGP® NetShare supports locally mounted FAT, FAT32, NTFS and DFS file systems. PGP® NetShare is independent of the file server so we work with various underlying file systems and tape formats, but PGP® NetShare does require a SMB/CIFS mount (we do not support NFS currently) to access the data. Click here for a complete list of supported file systems and file servers.