OREANDA-NEWS. ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation and ITOCHU Corporation announced that the companies will step up collaboration to, within Japan, develop high-quality cloud services originating in the United States and other countries.

As a first step, a distribution agency contractwith Box Inc. (headquartered in California, USA; Aaron Levie, CEO; hereinafter "Box"), CTC and ITOCHU start to sell on the market . Since 2005, Box has helped more than 15 million people at more than 150,000 businesses, including 92% of the Fortune 5001 securely access and share information from anywhere and on any device. On August 1,2013, CTC will begin offering the Box Business and Box Enterprise plans to its customers coupled with support services for introduction and post-introduction.

The concept of IT consumerization, referring to application of devices and technologies developed in the general consumer market to business uses, has recently been garnering attention. Typical examples include smartphones and tablets. This tendency is prompting a concern known as “shadow IT” in an environment where companies allow employees to use bring your own device (BYOD) to perform their tasks under predetermined rules, presenting IT aminstrators with new risks of information leakage. An additional tendency posing issues for IT administrators is online storage. This is in high demand among sales, marketing and other user division since it allows users to view files outside their office and provides them with designated storage capacity free-of-charge.

IT administrators therefore need to find ways to accommodate these user demands while maintaining the security level.

Box Business and Box Enterprise allows IT divisions to achieve safe and secure file collaborations between and within user companies while maintaining the level of convenience user divisions require. These services can also make available to thousands of users functions that IT divisions regard as important; including access permission setting and file version control in file units and file access history management, a condition for obtaining ISMS certification.

Since Box Business and Box Enterprise are also compatible with Microsoft’s Active Directory,the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and all kinds of Single Sign On (SSO), they can be used not only in combination with, but also as a substitute for division-wide or companywide file servers.