Author Archive

Security Prescription: Take Note of New HIPAA Rules

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

 

Changes are afoot in the health care industry. New HIPAA regulations were unveiled last month to ramp up patients’ privacy and access rights. One of the important new patient access rights is that individuals can now request a copy of their electronic medical records to be sent, well, electronically. I don’t know about you, but long ago my doctors traded in clipboards and pens for computers, iPads and mobile devices, capturing my personal health information via a simple, touchscreen interface. So, it only makes sense that as individuals we should be able to access our electronically stored personal medical data and play a more active role in how our medical-related information is communicated and managed.

The new HIPAA regulations also introduce increased penalties for HIPAA noncompliance. With data breaches continuing to make headlines, the penalty for negligence in protecting health information (PHI) now carries a maximum penalty of $1.5 million per violation.

From an individual’s perspective the new HIPAA regulations are excellent news.  Now it is mandated that we can easily get a copy of our own medical records, while at the same time organizations are being held increasingly accountable for protecting this sensitive information.

The new HIPAA rules also mean that health care organizations must have a secure file sharing and transfer method in place for sharing medical records with patients or risk paying the price in terms of hefty HIPAA fines .

Many of the leading healthcare organizations already use Accellion secure file sharing to ensure HIPAA compliance.  Read more about how one of the top U.S. hospitals turned to Accellion to boost data security, share vast amounts of information, and support ongoing HIPAA compliance.

If your organization hasn’t had a secure file sharing health checkup in the past year, please contact us for a confidential review of your current systems.  We are here to help.

 

 

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Posted in Accellion, HIPAA, Mobile | No Comments »

Accellion in Action: MiTek Industries,Inc. Stands up to Dropbox

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

How One IT Department Stood up to Dropbox and Just Said No.

With state-of-the-art engineering products and services for the building components industry at the heart of its business, MiTek Industries, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., regularly shares product enhancements, patches, and customer support materials with partners, employees, and customers. While the organization had provided employees with access via FTP, users were increasingly turning to Dropbox and other unapproved workarounds to support collaboration needs such as reviewing and editing files.

MiTek needed a secure alternative fast, but wasn’t willing to hand over control to just anyone – particularly those in the public cloud arena.

“With public cloud providers, there are so many unknowns when it comes to security: Where exactly are your files? How do you get files back if you change providers? How do you know where your employees are sending files? We weren’t willing to give up rights to data that was sensitive, proprietary, and rightfully ours,” said Justin Daniels, Web Services/Software Engineering and IT Support Manager with MiTek.

MiTek set out to find a secure and controlled collaboration solution to replace FTP and Dropbox. They came up with a list of key business requirements and reached out to current customers for vendor recommendations.

While you can probably guess which solution they picked, read the details on what led MiTek to Accellion and how we’re supporting the organization’s fast-paced business, including its remote sales and software reps.

Click here for the full story.

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Need for Mobile Productivity and Collaboration Driving Federal Cloud Deployments

Friday, January 18th, 2013

If you’re in the government sector, new cloud services and products are likely in the plans for 2013.  Cloud momentum continues to build according to InformationWeek Government’s third annual Federal Cloud Computing survey, which showed that half of its agency respondents are currently moving ahead with cloud adoption or are in the early stages of doing so – up from 40 percent last year.

So, what’s spurring this growth? According to the survey, the move to the cloud is being driven by three primary business objectives:

- Lowering the cost of ongoing IT operations (54%)

- Reducing capital investments in servers and data center equipment (51%)

- Supporting mobile productivity and collaboration within the agency and with other agencies (37%)

Number three on this list came as no surprise to us, as we talk every day with organizations – within the government and enterprise sectors – who are looking for more efficient, secure, and cost effective ways to access and share information on mobile devices with people inside and outside of the organization. That need leads them to Accellion.

For Accellion customer Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD), the ability to collaborate quickly and securely makes all the difference for the youth they serve. Operating dozens of treatment facilities, correctional institutions and halfway houses throughout the state, TJJD needed a way for its 2,500 employees to share confidential data efficiently and reliably between parents, medical staff and legal counsel.

Before switching to Accellion, staff members often turned to mailing hard copies of documents, burning CDs, or encrypting individual emails in order to work around a cumbersome file transfer and encryption mechanism. TJJD clearly needed a better option, fast.

The same could be said for other government organizations at the federal, state and local level that select Accellion. These customers include government agencies such as NASA, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Institute of Standards of Technology that have a need for the strictest security and compliance requirements for the sharing and collaboration of digital information.

If mobile productivity and collaboration are part of your cloud plans for 2013, we can help.

 

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Gmail Support for Files up to 10GB? That’s so 2002.

Friday, November 30th, 2012

This week Google announced that Gmail users can attach files stored in Google Drive to Gmail messages up to 10GB. “..whether it’s photos from your recent camping trip, video footage from your brother’s wedding, or a presentation to your boss, all your stuff is easy to find and easy to share…”, the company went on to say. Now, we’re OK with Drive being used for wilderness shots and videos of Uncle Bob cutting loose on the dance floor, but when it comes to business-related communications, like sending a PPT, we have to stop you right there.

For true enterprise collaboration and file sharing, we’ve found that size matters – as our customer, Mark Yee from AutoDesk, will tell you. That’s the beauty of our solution – there’s no hard limit on file size (Guinness World Records take note!) That means that our clients can send massive, data-intensive documents such as software upgrades, CAD drawings, media files, and customer databases, without wondering if a file is too big to be shared. And that’s been the case for years. Accellion customers have routinely sent files of 100-200GB in size and some brave souls have even sent 1TB files!

Plus, we provide tight security – integration with DLP solutions, automated audit trails, extensive file tracking and reporting, and customizable file access and storage controls – to make sure that your confidential data remains protected at rest and during transit. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Google, welcome to the party, albeit a tad late. While 10GB is progress, it’s not going to cut it for serious enterprise users. While we believe that large email attachments should be phased out with dinosaurs and fax machines, we love the idea of our clients sending Stegosaurus-sized documents. We can’t imagine that ever going out of style.

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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Email Attachments, Product | No Comments »

Extend Your Use of SharePoint: Unify, Mobilize, and Secure Enterprise Content

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

While a new survey shows that SharePoint adoption is on the rise, with 28 percent of respondents planning to deploy SharePoint 2013 within the next year and 26 percent planning to migrate to SharePoint 2013, this growth comes at a price, with serious administrative, staffing and security challenges. The survey revealed that SharePoint administrator staffing levels have decreased by 33 percent – from three to two people – and difficulty finding qualified IT personnel to manage SharePoint systems jumped from 28 percent to 44 percent.

With enterprise content often spread across SharePoint, Windows File Servers, NFS, FTP or ECM systems, there’s been no single, secure way for employees to retrieve desired files across file stores, share documents and collaborate – particularly from mobile devices. Until now…

Accellion brings together users’ content, regardless of where files are stored, providing a unified view of documents from desktops, Androids, iPhones, iPads, or other devices. Users gain mobile file access via a single, secure access point – no VPN needed – with the freedom to instantly view, edit, and share documents with internal or external constitutuents via a secure email link, up to 100MB in size. It’s the same easy browsing and access experience that Accellion Secure File Sharing has delivered to hundreds of enterprises and government agencies for years.

Plus, IT can kiss those SharePoint administrative headaches goodbye, with visibility into where files reside, who has viewed, and where documents have been sent. Apply desired security policies, including LDAP and Active Directory integration and eliminate the use of unsecure file sharing alternatives across your organization.

Isn’t it time you made SharePoint work for you.

 

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Three Lessons Learned from Colossal Government Data Breach

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Does the name Bradley Manning mean anything to you? If you’re a government organization, the name is synonymous with “colossal data breach” – as Manning spearheaded the biggest leak of classified information in our nation’s history.

To briefly recap, Manning, a U.S. Army soldier, single handedly accessed more than 900,000 intelligence documents, including daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he did it by downloading files onto CDs labeled “Lady Gaga”, which he shared with the whistleblower site, WikiLeaks.

According to Manning’s published chat logs, the event was “childishly easy”; “no one expected a thing”; and the “weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, and inattentive signal analysis created a perfect storm.”

With Manning’s trial just a few months away, we take a look back to share three important lessons learned from this monumental event:

Lesson #1: DLP is Important: While Manning had access to a classified network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, having a data loss prevention (DLP) solution in place that scanned information, across all network points before it left the network, would have provided an additional line of defense to prevent the data from being downloaded – to a CD, flash drive, or any other storage mechanism.

Lesson #2: It’s Time to Cast a Wider Security Net: Because most government agencies are large, data security can be focused on the “core” or interior of the network versus the perimeter of the organization. But, big data security challenges arise as employees have new ways to view and share confidential data – via BYOD movements, wireless access points, and consumer-based, third-party file sharing sites. Now that networks have become more decentralized, agencies need to deploy a wider “net” to secure and manage data.

Lesson #3: Security and Large File Size Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Large data transfers are not only common within the government domain, they are often required. But how are agencies securing and managing that data?  And, can large files be shared simply and on demand? To address these needs, organizations are turning to mobile file sharing solutions that give employees the ability to send and synchronize large, classified and confidential documents with ease, while giving IT the security, authentication, encryption and file tracking and reporting capabilities necessary to support data security best practices.

These are three key lessons to remember as we move into 2013 and strive to keep newsworthy security breaches a part of our past, fully protecting government data exchanges of the future.

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Posted in Accellion, Data Breach, Data Security | No Comments »

Who Controls the Keys to Your (Data) Kingdom?

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

True or false? When you share your information with a public cloud service, you give up “ownership” rights to that data? Well, as some Twitter users can tell you, when an official legal request is involved, that statement is definitely true.

During the first half of this year alone, Twitter received 679 legal requests for user information – and ending up releasing the data 75 percent of the time. Begging the question: when you partner with a public cloud provider, is the information you make “public” rightfully yours?

But, even more importantly, to all IT executives out there, do you know where all of your data resides? It seems the majority aren’t quite sure. According to 2012 survey by Varonis, 67 percent of IT executives do not know where there data is and 74 percent don’t have a process for tracking which files have been placed on a third-party cloud storage server. So, if your cloud provider were to get compromised, you wouldn’t know which documents were at risk – a scary predicament, and a tough one to explain to the boss.

Most of our customers tell us that their data is the lifeblood of their businesses, so why hand over control of that information to anyone else? What many organizations are realizing is that when enterprise documents are stored or shared via a public cloud vendor, the vendor owns the keys to the data – the encryption keys, that is.

This is a showstopper, because it means IT surrenders all control over protection of their corporate jewels. He who owns the keys controls how information is accessed, by whom, and from where. If the keys were to be compromised (a real possibility given recent breaches of public cloud vendors as well as security vendors), your private data could become public in the blink of an eye.

I’d imagine you’d like to keep much of your private corporate data exactly that: private. So, make it a priority to know where your data is, how it could be used and the associated risks.

It’s your business, or kingdom, if you will. Insist on owning and protecting its keys.

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Get In Control of Sync – Perception of Security is Not Enough

Monday, August 27th, 2012

Do you remember the first document you saved on a thumb drive? It used to be that employees wouldn’t leave the office without one – routinely saving board slides and keynote presentations on these mini storage devices. While still a popular giveaway at tradeshows (how many have you stockpiled over the years?), the idea of having corporate data floating around unprotected is too risky of a proposition for an enterprise of any size.

This has led organizations to seek out thumb drive replacements – solutions that are just as straightforward to use and provide anytime, anywhere information access, but with more security. Unfortunately, as Clive Longbottom, Head of Research with Quocirca points out, many have made a misstep, turning to cloud storage systems such as DropBox and Apple iCloud, which are only causing updated versions of the same problem. So, IT administrators then ban employee usage, but employees continue to use the solutions anyway, creating merely “a perception of security” because nothing has actually changed.

Longbottom urges enterprises to find a better approach. One that: 1) allows users to not only view and edit documents, but to share files with required external constituents; 2) supports any device and O/S combination; 3) is as easy to use as consumer solutions; and 4) applies granular security for storage and user access rights. We know just the answer.

Accellion kitedrive™ sync – dubbed “Dropbox for the enterprise” – makes sure that confidential data is securely and seamlessly synchronized, providing around-the-clock availability of all types of files. Users can work both online and offline, from both Windows and Mac environments, via smartphones, laptops, or other devices. As with all of our solutions, security is a top priority, and kitedrive is no exception, supporting LDAP integration, single sign-on through SAML, administrator activity logs, and integration with DLP solutions.

In addition to the new Mac availability, kitedrive sync also includes new features that give users control over the frequency of sync and which folders should sync. Details on these features include:

Selective Sync – Enables users to select and de-select syncing for shared files and folders.Selective Sync makes it easier for users to synchronize the content that matters the most to them. Users can decide which content they want to synchronize and when.

Scheduled Sync – Enables users to schedule the synchronization of files and folders. Users can easily get the most up–to-date content across devices with the frequency they want. Users can synchronize content on a frequency of every 60 minutes to every 24 hours. Kitedrive is the ideal cloud and file management enterprise solution, making sure critical business information is everywhere your users need it to be.

Say goodbye to the thumb drive and hello to kitedrive file synchronization.

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