• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 14, 2011

Search marketing platform company BrightEdge has taken steps to secure client data through a series of enterprise-class offerings that support cloud services typically offered by IT-related companies housing data. The services, which most search marketers probably have not encountered, range from redundant data centers, ISO/IEC 27001 standards, certification and Hadoop clusters to EU/Swiss Safe Harbor compliance.

This move to the cloud by companies to support services will have search marketers learning new buzzwords, such as redundancy and recovery tools, as well as Hadoop clusters, an open-source Apache technology that allows distribution of large data sets.

Moving services into the cloud requires backup. Andrew Taylor, search marketing manager at Citrix Systems --which supports cloud computing -- has worked for years with BrightEdge, which a month ago began to offer enterprise-class services to secure and authenticate data.

"They compile at any given moment lots of sensitive data," he said. "They run crawler programs to find rankings and technical issues with domains. The information gets indexed and saved. If the data gets compromised that would be a huge problem for us."

Data leaks would not only give away company secrets, but would make all kinds of competitive data available to others, Taylor said. Meeting data certification standards also increases and confirms the platform's stability, he said.

At Citrix, Taylor uses the BrightEdge platform, along with counterparts around the globe in Asia and Europe. If BrightEdge pulls down the data once weekly for five hours per day, it could potentially put a halt to or slow Citrix's business during work hours.

"Security has always been important to BrightEdge -- it is one of our founding values. ... Enterprise grade security has been a part of how we built BrightEdge S3 from day one," said Jim Yu, the company's CEO.