On-going revelations of NSA spying and data monitoring have made corporate customers nervous about doing business with American tech companies, and tech companies have been trying to ease their fears by bolstering the security of their products.

Indeed, security has become a selling point for companies that can demonstrate how much they care about customers' data, although how data is protected and how much it's protected are still not standard.

"Enterprises try to disregard security whenever they possibly can unless they have compliance mandates because it can reduce their agility," said Gartner Research Director Lawrence Pingree. "Even though [security] makes people paranoid and causes consternation, at the end of the day, it's all about money."

Convo Inc. Chief Executive Faizan Buzdar, whose company's online collaboration software is used by customers with very sensitive information, now encrypts data both in transit—as it travels between a server and a user's machine—and at rest, when it's sitting on the server.

Encrypting data in transit is common, but encrypting data at rest is more complicated, and Mr. Buzdar says that Convo, which is a cloud company, goes beyond other vendors in its category by encrypting all data on the server at all times so that a hacker would find only gibberish.