Encrypted messaging provider Wire has landed a marquee customer in EY France, in a contract win set to put the Switzerland-based company firmly on the enterprise radar.
While Wire is AWS-hosted (on EMEA data centres) as standard, EY France chose to adapt it to run it on its own private cloud infrastructure, working with the Wire team to make this possible.
It’s an approach that Wire CEO Morten Brøgger told Computer Business Review he thinks may prove popular: with engineering lessons learned all round, the company is releasing a general on-premises version of the messaging service as a result next quarter.
EY France Chief Digital Officer Yannick de Kerhor said: “We chose Wire to develop a self-hosted, secure collaboration and communication platform primarily because it offers the most secure end-to-end-encryption on the market without compromising user experience. Wire’s technology also allows EY to privately host the platform on our own private cloud in France. We are moving first and fast in our industry, taking all means of communication around confidential data and projects to a new industry level of security”.
Wire – which offers secure messaging, voice, video and file sharing uses Proteus, an implementation of the axolotl protocol (Double Ratchet algorithm) without header keys for encryption, updating the encryption key with each message for security. It has a 550-strong customer base and also names Blackrock and Unicef as customers.
Wire CEO Morten Brøgger said: “We believe EY’s proactivity will be a wake-up call to public and private organisations around the world who are considering how best to address the rising tide of cyber threats.” Speaking to Computer Business Review he added: “We went through a good proof of concept together and are proud of [securing EY] as a marquee customer. It validates our belief that enterprises will increasingly recognise that their communication needs to be secure.”
“The exposure we get to large enterprise customers is very attractive.”
Computer Business Review understands that EY France’s platform will scale to 50,000 users and that the consultancy has already moved 15 clients to the platform.
Among Wire’s current limitations are that conference calls are limited to 10 people owing to the latency issues caused above that by the bandwidth needed to handle the number of encryption keys involved, but the company has been leading the development of a new protocol called Messaging Layer Security alongside partners like Google that it thinks will solve that issue in the very near future.
Read this: What You Need to Know About “Messaging Layer Security” and Why You Should Care
