Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives had the opportunity to sit down with Alex Orlov, CTO and Co-Founder of AfterLogic, and ask him about Afterlogic Aurora and WebMail Pro.
Safety Detectives: What has your journey to your current job been?
Alex Orlov: It started back in 2000 when I finally got an Internet connection in my family home. I was a student back then. My friend and I decided to try a web-development business. At first, we did everything ourselves, then we started to hire more people as the business kept growing. Turns out my entire professional life is dedicated to Afterlogic.
SD: Tell me about your company’s services.
AO: We’re both a product and service company. As a product company, we develop a set of corporate groupware, file cloud, mail server, and webmail systems, accompanied by mobile apps. For instance, Afterlogic Aurora and WebMail Pro—corporate groupware and cloud file storage with strong end-to-end encryption. We’re also the leading vendor of email components for .NET developers and MailBee.NET Objects. Many Fortune 500 businesses, top universities, and government institutions rely on our email libraries in their apps.
As a service company (acting under the name Afterlogic.Works) we provide a wide range of outsourced web and mobile development services at attractive costs. Although initially it was targeted to customizing, branding, integration, and maintenance of our own products, it has now expanded to developing web and mobile solutions not necessarily connected with our products in any way. We are experts in building complex, high-load web apps in Node.JS, PHP with React, and Vue.js frontends (including complex animations). Many digital agencies work with us as the development partner as we’re accustomed to working on a while-label basis acting as the natural extension of their teams.
SD: What makes your company unique?
AO: As a product company, we’re very flexible—we always offer the options for customers with specific needs to get what they are looking for—be it sponsored development, custom development, and so on. We work with each customer individually, offering them the options which would be the best fit for them. Usually, this personalized approach is more common for service companies but because we combine both services and products, our customers benefit from this dual nature of our business.
SD: How does your company keep your customers’ data secure?
AO: I believe we’re the first market to introduce built-in end-to-end encryption of file storage right in the browser (we call it Paranoid Encryption). This way the server has no access to encryption keys and decrypted data making the entire deployment immune to stealing or exposing sensitive data. Later we added Paranoid Encryption for PGP. This support is also incorporated in our mobile apps for iOS/Android.
Of course, we also offer typical access restriction functionality like Two-Factor Authentication, OAuth 2.0, and security tokens (e.g. YubiKeys).
SD: How has the pandemic affected your industry?
AO: For the team, working remotely has its drawbacks but the impact was insignificant as we adjusted our internal processes promptly. At the same time, we noticed a growing interest in our solutions and development services as more and more businesses went online in those days. Adapt quickly—that’s the key to the success. And we did.