Salesforce rolls out new security add-on for Quip

Salesforce today rolled out Quip Shield, a HIPAA-certified security add-on to its Quip platform. The new service includes enterprise key management, event monitoring and antivirus scanning, intended to increase trust compliance and governance in collaboration and promises minimal services disruption.

Quip is an integrated productivity platform from Salesforce that offers real-time collaboration with docs, spreadsheets, slides and chat that companies can embed directly into Salesforce records. Quip Shield is a security add-on intended to protect business data in Quip.

Salesforce said that Quip Shield offers encryption and customization capabilities according to companies' particular security and compliance demands, such as secure infrastructure services, granular permissions and external sharing controls. Like the Quip platform, the new product is HIPAA-certified, promising to provide appropriate security for healthcare organizations to collaborate around protected health information while staying compliant.

The new security add-on touts uninterrupted service in CRM; the product works in the background, with little impact on the end-user experience, the company said. When there is an incident, users would experience minimal disruption, while admins work to isolate and secure data, according to Salesforce.

Services offered in Quip Shield include:

• Enterprise key management: Controls access to certain data by monitoring all encryption key usages in a locked audit log, and revoking access to the business' encrypted data when potential threats are identified.
• Event monitoring: Enables the enterprise to set custom rules to flag and address suspicious behaviors and to log events, which will then be processed through security information and event monitoring systems and cloud access security brokers to identify malicious activity, threats and take immediate action.
• Antivirus scanning: Scans files uploaded to Quip Shield for malicious content, and prevents users from downloading potentially infected files.

Quip Shield is available to customers as of today. The company said organizations can choose to add Quip Shield to Quip Enterprise, Quip for Salesforce and Quip Virtual Private Cloud licenses for an additional cost and pricing varies based on usage.

Quip for Salesforce competes with Slack, Skype and Cisco, among other vendors. Slack also offers security features for teamwork and collaboration, including data encryption and Slack Enterprise Key Management, which enables bringing your own keys for data access. Skype for Business advertises itself as a low-cost collaboration product for business of varied sizes, offering its service on a range of devices. Cisco Jabber offers instant messaging and soft-phone features, including HD voice and video, and more.