/n software's Virtual Drives and Development Tools Help Build Powerful Solutions

TL; DR: /n Software, the leading provider of communications and security components for professional developers worldwide, continues to expand its product offerings to better serve developers and systems administrators alike. With the addition of virtual drive products such as SFTP Drive, S3 Drive, and AES Drive, users can quickly and easily access data through a local virtual drive. The new drive products build on a long history of delivering robust enterprise quality components to the development community.

As businesses work more and more remotely during the pandemic, securely sharing files and maintaining data in a secure location has become paramount. These type of drive utilities enable employees to collaborate on files locally without actually storing them locally.

SFTP Drive and S3 Drive are two easy-to-use utilities that mount remote file systems as Windows drives via SFTP or S3 compatible service providers. Once connected, you can browse and work with files as if they were stored on your local machine. Users can open any file from a local virtual drive and edit that file using their preferred editor. Any changes will be applied to remote files directly without creating duplicate copies on the disk.

AES Drive is a similar mounted drive utility which also adds enterprise quality encryption to your files wherever they are. Your files are always password protected and securely encrypted in the cloud or elsewhere. On the other hand, a decrypted image of these files is available at your fingertips locally through the local virtual drive experience.

“These new drive products represent a culmination of decades of networking and security experience,” said Spencer Brown, Product Manager at /n software. The Company’s flagship development library, IPWorks, is used by most Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, as well as thousands of independent developers, to rapidly build web, desktop, and server applications.

“We aim to create long-term relationships with our customers built on years of trust and experience,” Spencer told us.

Spencer added that the company is very much customer-focused, leveraging user feedback to drive development and meet market demands.

“We are regularly adding new features based on what customers might need,” he said. “If someone comes to us and says, ‘This product fits 95% of what I need to do, can you help me achieve that last 5%?’ the answer is almost always ‘Yes.’ We’re very flexible.”

Over the years, /n software has developed a good list of products — from cross-platform components and libraries for internet communications and security to network management and cloud storage solutions. Spencer told us its product set has and will continue to evolve based on customer and market needs.

“Initially, of course, there was a lot of focus on components for FTP, HTTP, SMTP — making developers lives easier by extending the functionality on whatever framework they were on,” he said. “Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve added file and document storage components for integrating with popular cloud repositories.”

IPWorks Cloud, for example, makes it easier for developers to integrate cloud-based file storage within their applications via providers like Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. The component library includes powerful client-side encryption for additional security.

The company also recently released IPWorks IoT, a lightweight component library built upon the IPWorks framework but optimized for installation on small IoT-enabled devices. IPWorks IoT helps developers implement a range of IoT protocols, including MQP, MQTT, STOMP, and CoAP, to enable communication between devices.

“We also recently released Cloud Keys,a new product that’s geared toward cloud-based data protection services and key management,” Spencer said. “We’ve covered quite a bit in terms of the traditional protocols — the ones that people have been using for decades — and now we’re expanding in protocols for newer industry areas.”

Spencer said that, in addition to the cloud and IoT space, /n software is also continuously expanding in terms of platform editions. The company currently supports platforms for nearly every desktop, mobile, and server platform, including Android, .NET, Java, macOS, iOS, PHP, and Node.js.

“Our whole goal here is that anything in the realm of networking security we want to make available to you — both in breadth and depth — in as many platforms as we can and as many libraries as we can, so whatever you want to do, we’ve got you covered,” he said.

And all products come backed with the support of a talented tech team. Spencer said /n software is highly selective in the people that the company hires for these roles because it’s essential to deliver an excellent customer experience.

“Making customers happy is very important to us, so we put a lot of emphasis on our support team,” he said. “We try to provide fast turnaround times, and we regularly receive compliments for our quick resolutions, which is very rewarding for us.”

At the same time, /n software is careful not to violate customer privacy rights by collecting personal data. “Our visibility into what our customers do with our tools is very limited — and that’s the way we like it,” Spencer said. “we wouldn’t want a company selling our data behind our backs, and we know our customers wouldn’t either.”