This documentation is for 3.4.x versions of Safe Share and the Covata Platform.

Please refer to our important notice for information that relates to this documentation.

Overview of Safe Share and the Covata Platform

Covata provides a complete solution and platform for securely protecting and sharing encrypted files and folders which can be stored and accessed anywhere (within an organization, outside the domain and from mobile devices).

Covata's technologies provide this solution through the Covata Platform (upon which Safe Share is built), whose Access Service centrally manages cryptographic keys (used to encrypt/decrypt content) and access controls (which define who can access/decrypt content and when).

The Covata Platform's Access Service handles its key management and access controls separately from cryptography and user content. This separation helps ensure that encrypted content is only able to be decrypted by the people it's intended for.

Users of Covata technologies ^* can share their secured content with others through Covata's Safe Share applications, which integrate with the Covata Platform to ensure that critical key management and access controls are adhered to.

The Covata Platform provides an application programming interface (API), which allows integrators to develop their own applications that leverage Covata's powerful data-centric security features.

Safe Share Administration

Safe Share Administration is a web-based interface for administering organizations on a Covata Platform instance. This interface also provides access to a number of configurable features of Covata technologies ^* that apply to all organizations configured on the Covata Platform.

Safe Share administrators are users who, once signed in to Safe Share Administration, can access its dashboard (depicted above) and have the ability to perform the following administration activities on their Covata Platform instance:

Administer all Safe Share administrator users on the Covata Platform.
Note: Any user who has an account registered on the Covata Platform is known as a Covata user. A Safe Share administrator is one type of Covata user. For more information about other types of Covata users, please refer to Administering users within an organization in the Safe Share Organization Administration section of this guide.
Administer all organizations on the Covata Platform.
Configure Covata users through LDAP connections (for Covata Platform instances with a single organization only).
Configure single sign-on (SSO) using a SAML-based Identity Provider (IdP).
Register client apps, which are integrator-developed applications that utilize any aspect of Covata technologies made available through the Covata Platform's API.
Change aspects of Safe Share's behavior by modifying Safe Share Administration configuration properties.
Adjust the user interface languages of Safe Share Administration, Safe Share Organization Administration and the default used for Safe Share for Web, as well as upload/delete language bundles using internationalization.

^* Covata technologies refers to all features and functionality provided by (and made available through) the Covata Platform, including Covata's Safe Share applications, the Covata Platform's API and the Covata Platform itself.