Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr — a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With Wickr, customers and partners benefit from advanced security features not available with traditional communications services – across messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, and collaboration. This gives security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance requirements, AWS said in its statement.
AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, “effective immediately,” notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news.
Commenting on the acquisition, Stephen Schmidt, AWS CISO, said: “The need for this type of secure communications is accelerating. With the move to hybrid work environments, due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic, enterprises and government agencies have a growing desire to protect their communications across many remote locations. Wickr’s secure communications solutions help enterprises and government organizations adapt to this change in their workforces and is a welcome addition to the growing set of collaboration and productivity services that AWS offers customers and partners.”
Wickr, which was founded in 2011 and is based in San Fransisco, describes itself as the “most secure” video conferencing and collaboration platform. Unlike other collaboration tools, which encrypt messages as they travel from a user’s device to a company’s servers but store those communications in an unencrypted state, Wickr uses end-to-end encryption which means that only people on either end of a conversation can decrypt and read messages.
Wickr also offers users an ephemeral messaging feature, which allows users to set self-destruction timers for as short as a few seconds.
The company has recently made a big push into the enterprise as a result of the mass shift to online communications. In February this year Wickr launched ‘Global Federation’, a feature that enables enterprise and government entities to securely communicate using end-to-end encryption with mission-critical partners outside of their network.
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