Securing Volly: A Pitney Bowes challenge

Pitney Bowes later this year will launch a cloud-based digital mailbox service for consumers and business customers. The new service, called Volly, will leverage the company’s customer communications management platform and is designed to help business customers deliver communications via multiple channels and to enable consumers to aggregate their electronic mailings such as bills, statements and catalogs.

Volly will provide capabilities such as bill consolidation and payment, coupon expiration notices, digital personal archives for mail and permission-based marketing.

Ensuring the strongest possible security is one of Pitney Bowes main priorities — and challenges — in implementing Volly and planning the infrastructure that will support it.

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“We wanted to make sure that document content is secure in transmission [across multiple cloud service providers] and in usage,” says Surya Sagi, vice president of product development and chief systems architect at Pitney Bowes. A core part of the [Volly] platform is ensuring security and privacy” of personally identifiable information, Sagi says.

As part of the security strategy, Volly will use token-based authentication with multiple validations and authorization checks to control access to content. All information will be encrypted during transmission and while in storage in cloud provider systems.

In addition, the service will use hardware security modules for multi-layered content security. Volly will comply with a variety of security specifications, including PCI and TRUSTe, Sagi says.

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“With Volly, we are protecting the security and integrity of the contents similar to physical mail, from the time mailers send the communication to the [time] consumers open the communication, by encrypting content at all stages,” Sagi says.