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Driving confidentiality: Tresorit to provide the highest level of security to automotive clients

A global talent network of 200-plus automotive designers needed a hassle-free solution for storing and sharing confidential client materials.

Preventing Grand Theft Auto: high-value secrets and delicate supply chains

“Understandably, a lot of our work and clients have to remain confidential. Our designers have already been trusted by the world’s leading brands, and if necessary can operate within your existing processes and infrastructure,” Forge Design’s website proudly states. There is good reason why trustworthiness is so prominently featured on the sleek home page. Founded in 2016, the London-based company is in the business of connecting the automotive industry with the best ideas and top design talent from all across the globe. A network of over 200 senior designers, full-timers and freelancers alike, Forge Design enables inspiration, collaboration and problem-solving in a secure and convenient way.

“Secrecy, confidentiality and commercial secrets are taken extremely seriously in the automotive industry. It’s even more extreme than in the defence sector,” Kieran Singleton, Forge Design’s co-founder explains. And when it comes to achieving that, everyone has a part to play. “The auto industry has a deep and complex supply chain, and third-party security risk is an area of growing concern,” according to Auto-ISAC executive director Faye Francy in a New York Times article last year.

All the best: top talent for top clients

Working with hundreds of third parties, this hits home for the up-and-coming sourcing company. “We are a global marketplace for the best automotive design talent and provide high-quality design services to automotive companies. Household names that have in-house design studios sometimes need to get new design ideas or opinions, and we help them do that remotely,” Kieran says. What he and his colleagues do is essentially assemble teams of top designers from their network and manage them in distributed teams. “To be able to do this and ensure the appropriate level of security, we need the best possible software,” he adds. “As an emerging brand, it’s very important to us that the quality of our work is not compromised. If anything that we deliver is not excellent, we’re dead.”

This is why a few years back, Forge decided to look for a secure file-storing and sharing solution that puts their clients’ minds at ease – not to mention their own. After two months of research and trials, they set their heart on Tresorit. “Tresorit came on top in most of the reviews. Right from the start, it seemed like a very clean, straightforward solution,” Kieran recalls. The fact that it came with zero-knowledge authentication and end-to-end encryption technology also tipped the scales in Tresorit’s favour. “We’ve been using it for a year and a half now and it’s been excellent. It’s easy to use, and it gives our potential clients and investors assurance that our data security is built on a backbone of end-to-end encryption. They really appreciate it.”

Tresorit enables us to provide our clients the highest possible level of information security, with utter simplicity. It’s the perfect solution for us.
Kieran Singletonco-founder of Forge Design

All-in-one: the ultimate cloud solution for everyone

Today, Forge Design’s external suppliers simply upload their work to a tresor that’s also shared with the client who can then easily download and review the documents. In a recent project, two of their remote designers worked with a car manufacturer based in Germany on a new automotive concept. They prepared sketches on paper or in Photoshop and shared them with Forge Design for review via Tresorit. “We would review the materials to provide design leadership, then pass the final work onto the client, who could easily access the full presentation as well as the individual files. We were able to send files quickly through a link and design directors could even have a look at them on their phone if they had to. Tresorit ensured flexibility on how we shared the data and there was no hassle with uploading or downloading documents,” Kieran says.

His entire team uses Tresorit in their day-to-day to create and manage folders, upload and download sensitive files and create secure links to share them. They first set up tresors to store and share files for projects only. However, they quickly started sending files above a certain size via tresors for simplicity; and now use Tresorit Drive to store even their day-to-day company files, enabling their employees to work in a fully distributed way. Clients’ response to the file-sharing tool has also been overwhelmingly positive. As Kieran puts it: “One of the things that we must be able to do when talking to clients is to ensure them that while the work is outsourced to remote teams, confidentiality will never be compromised. We’d worked with a number of different suppliers but when it comes to the actual transmission of data, end to end, Tresorit was by far the best example that we could find.”

Company

Forge Design is a global marketplace for the best automotive design talent, offering world-class design services with distributed teams and exceptional project management. Tapping a network of over 200 seasoned designers, the company provides access to great ideas and simple workflow management tools in a secure and flexible way.

Industry

Design

Region

Europe

Size

2-10

The challenge

  • Clients include leading car manufacturers with stringent security requirements

  • Teams receive and share highly confidential product designs

  • Relies on a network of over 200 designers all across the globe

  • Needed a secure file-sharing tool which is also easy to use

Tresorit’s solution

  • Zero-knowledge, end-to-end encryption for the highest level of security

  • Both external collaborators and clients can easily access documents

  • Clients can rest assured about the safety of workflows and deliverables

  • Made other cloud solutions unnecessary

Ready to start working securely?

Unlike Dropbox, Tresorit uses built-in end-to-end encryption. Read more

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