New Zealand Law Society plays a very important role: acting as the regulatory authority for all lawyers across the country. To make that happen, ongoing committee, planning, and board communications and meetings are a regular part of operations. Anything that can be done to make the meetings more efficient translates to less time around the meeting table and faster decision-making.
With some meeting documentation exceeding 2,000 pages, printing hard copies for meeting participants just didn’t make sense – from either a cost or environmental perspective. The Society decided to make a change, equipping board members with iPads so that any necessary files could be shared, edited, and accessed electronically. How? Via Accellion.
“Our board meetings have taken on a whole new level of efficiency,” said Malcolm Gunn, IT Manager with New Zealand Law Society. “We upload documents to Accellion and board members download the files on their iPad using the Accellion Mobile App. They annotate the PDFs prior to meetings and then access those notes during the discussion.”
The success of using Accellion for board meetings has paved the way for use among other Society committees, legal research teams, and librarians.
Click here to read New Zealand Law Society’s full story.
Cloud-based file sharing and collaboration solutions are ripe for the picking, but what’s right for one organization might not be right for another. Accellionpresented the pros and cons of various cloud computing choices at the InfoSec World 2013 Conference & Expo last month. To learn more about the top cloud considerations for file sharing and collaboration and to find out where you stand on the privacy and public cloud debate, check out this presentation entitled ”Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
A topic that concerns every law firm CIO and IT manager today is whether to permit legal professionals to bring their own computing devices to work, for work. In other words, to support BYOD or not to support BYOD: that is the question. Or, at least it’s the question of the moment– with law firms, like so many organizations, considering how to support employees’ preferences to use personal mobile devices for work purposes, while keeping corporate documents properly managed and secure.
Should you support unlimited device types? How can you track which documents are shared outside of company walls? How does BYOD fit into your existing compliance strategy? It’s these questions that are currently the talk of the legal world. Check out some recent headlines:
Accellion Chief Marketing Officer, Paula Skokowski, will lead a panel on “Protecting Legal Documents in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Post PC Era” with Chris Zegers, CIO of Lowenstein Sandler, Chad Ergun, Director of Global Services & Business Intelligence at Gibson & Dunn and Avi Solomon, Director of IT at Becker and Poliakoff P.A. at the Law Firm Chief Information and Technology Officers Forum. The panel will take place on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 from 11:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. ET in conjunction with the LegalTech New York 2013 conference.
Accellion will also be exhibiting at the LegalTech New York 2013 conference at booth #1403.
At Accellion, ‘tis always the season for sharing. But at this time of year, in particular, we think about all the sharing our customers do everyday that makes the world a better place. As 2012 comes to a close we wanted to share a quick roundup of some of our favorite Accellion file sharing examples for the year:
- The biopharmaceutical company sharing test results for new cancer drug.
- The publishing house collaborating with children’s book authors
- The renewable energy company sending confidential customer documents and sharing our world’s natural resource.
- The major city using Accellion to communicate to parents and communities about juvenile legal issues
-The University sharing files to support the daily curriculum and shaping the bright minds of the future
-The engineering company sharing amazing new products blueprints and design ideas
- The global advertising agency that eliminates delivery delays and gets that Super Bowl ad completed on time
- The government agency that makes sure vital national security teams have access to the latest information in the field
-The major news syndicate whose reporters file stories with their editors using Accellion
- Rural doctors sending files to expert colleagues in urban areas to get specialist opinions for their patients
November 11th is Veterans Day. It’s a day to honor United States’ veterans of all conflicts for their patriotism and willingness to serve. Veterans Day was originally established to honor Americans who had served in World War I. Since then, it has become a national holiday that is celebrated on November 11, the anniversary of the day World War I ended in 1918.
Many people will celebrate the holiday by attending special events that honor those who have served in the military. Some will attend events in their local communities. Others will travel to the nation’s capital for the observance at Arlington National Cemetery.
For the Veterans, it’s a family reunion of sorts. They roll up on motorcycles, in wheelchairs, taxicabs, and city busses. They shuffle with canes, with limps, and with pride. Many come wearing their uniform of service with the emblems of their military units. They come accompanied by family, by friends and by the memories of their time served.
The Accellion team would like to say thank you to the military family that has served honorably to protect the rights and liberties of this great nation. We owe a debt of gratitude that words alone cannot express.
An Osterman Research report recently conducted a survey of 760 individuals addressing the bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, issues facing their organizations and found widespread use of third-party, cloud-based storage and file-synchronization offerings that are sometimes used with IT’s blessing, but more often not. Dropbox, for example, is used in 14 percent of 1,000-plus-employee organizations with IT’s blessing—and, conversely, in 44 percent of them without approval.
So enterprises need to look for a system that combines easy-to-use file sharing and synchronization services with enterprise-class security controls. eWEEK with the help of Jon Pincus, senior vice president of products at Accellion, a provider of enterprise-class secure file sharing solutions, brings together 10 best practices on this topic.
The high-tech world has no shortage of acronyms. DLP, NAC, TCP, WAN, Wifi– the list goes on and on, making it tough to keep track of the latest buzzwords. Perhaps one of the most widely used acronyms currently is BYOD- the much talked about trend of employees bringing their own devices into the enterprise and the security challenges created as a result.
Well, get ready, because there’s a new acronym that’s entered the fold: BYOC. Bring Your Own Collaboration.
While research conducted this summer by Varonis Systems found that 80 percent of companies do not allow their employees to use collaboration services due to data leakage concerns. Guess what? Your employees are using these solutions anyway.
A survey by Computacenter of IT decision makers found that 84 percent of employees secretly access consumer cloud collaboration solutions in the workplace because their own organizations don’t provide effective alternatives. Translation: if you don’t provide a corporate file sharing and collaboration option, employees will make a point to find one on their own, creating a BYOC ripple effect before you know it.
This BYOC movement is yet another reason for IT administrators to lose sleep. Point in case, Dan Raywood with SC Magazine recently attended a CISO roundtable and the question, “what keeps you awake at night” was answered by a panelist with a single word: “Dropbox.” So, there you have it.
Employees clearly need a way to collaborate and share information. So, you can either provide them with a solution that’s secure and built for enterprise use, or they’ll bring one of their own, which probably will not be secure or appropriate for enterprise user. What’s it going to be?
If it hasn’t happened to you, consider yourself lucky: misplacing your phone is never a great feeling. While you might immediately think of lost contacts, to-do lists, and calendar items, IT administrators have much more serious concerns on their minds, including the possibility of corporate data getting into the wrong hands.
A new survey by Credant Technologies shows that more than 8,000 devices were left at the largest U.S. airports last year alone – with the majority forgotten at security checkpoints and in restrooms. Add to that startling number, the fact that Javelin Strategy & Research found that 62% of smartphone users do not use password protection on their home screens, leaving content wide open to anyone in possession of the phone – a very scary thought.
Hence, all of the current discussions around the need for organizations to deploy solutions, processes, and policies to secure users’ mobile devices, dubbed mobile device management (MDM). In a well-timed move, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released draft Guidelines for Managing and Securing Mobile Devices in the Enterprise which outlines recommended steps to boost the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data on smartphones and tablets.
NIST stresses the importance of:
1) providing secure access to enterprise computing resources;
2) supporting strongly encrypted data communications;
3) requiring user and device authentication before accessing enterprise resources; and
4) restricting which mobile applications may be installed.
That’s great advice for any organization, large or small, across any industry and Accellion secure file sharing can help meet all of these recommendations. Because, while no one wants to imagine leaving behind their trusted phone, we all know that anyone can make a mistake.
Service outages, application access errors, and security hiccups – that’s exactly what we’ve seen happen in recent months with cloud storage providers Dropbox, YouSendIt, and Box. All were reported to have experienced unexpected issues:
Perhaps Eric Chiu, founder of HyTrust, Inc., a virtualized infrastructure security and management vendor said it best to TechTarget, calling Dropbox “the poster child” for an application that’s infiltrated the enterprise with huge security implications.
Osterman Research, in a recent research report “The Need for Enterprise-Grade File Sharing and Synchronization” found that 49% of organizations believe the problems created by these tools are about as serious as they were 12 months ago, but 42% reported they are more serious.
Before putting your data on the line and exposing it to a potential security glitch or exposing your users to unnecessary usage issues, you must weigh the risks and benefits of a particular provider. And, don’t overlook the hefty regulatory implications if a security snafu hinders your compliance with HIPAA, SOX, and other data privacy mandates.
Many organizations are turning to enterprise-class solutions such as Accellion. While we offer the flexibility of public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, 80 percent of our enterprise customers go the private cloud route – benefitting from around-the-clock availability, security, and confidentiality of company information.
We’re just hours from the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games, marked by the arrival of the Olympic torch in London. The torch is ready for a place to call home, as it’s been on an intense journey through more than 1,000 cities and towns in the U.K over the past 70 days.
There’s a lot riding on this time-honored tradition (dating back to 1936) that includes more than 8,000 torchbearers, who were selected through a nomination process, and millions of spectators along the route. With security a top priority for all involved, the host city police force – The Metropolitan Police (The Met) – takes their job very seriously, preparing for the past 18 months as intensely as the athletes scheduled to compete.
An Accellion customer, The Met spearheads safety procedures for both the Olympic Flame and the torchbearers, synchronizing activities with National Olympic Coordination Centre and maintaining teams on the ground that shadow the torch as it passes through 95 percent of the country.
While the torch ends its travels tonight, with the final torchbearer lighting the Olympic cauldron, The Met’s job is far from over. The police force will also guard the security of the Paralympic Torch Relay in August, with four flames coming together from London, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff.
We’re proud to call The Met an Accellion customer and of all they did to bring the torch safely to Olympic Stadium. Let the games begin…
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