FileTalk - An Accellion Blog

November 11^th 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. 

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With 144.8 billion emails sent every day and the number projected to rise to 192.2 billion in 2016, according to the Radicati Group, email remains the preferred method of communication in the workplace – going on two decades strong. Yet, most business users aren’t able to send attachments at will, with IT typically capping outbound file size limits at 10MB.

With the Accellion Outlook Plug-in, you can extend your organization’s use of Outlook, improve email performance, and just maybe score a few popularity points of your own with your business users. With the new enhanced features plug-in users can send files up to 2GB in size directly from within Microsoft Outlook. Users simply click on the Accellion “Attach Items” icon on the Outlook toolbar, select the file, hit “send” and Accellion takes over, offloading the attachment – delivering the file as a secure link and enabling download following authentication. Attach, send, secure.

But, our new plug-in is about much more than super-sizing file limits.  It’s about giving users new features with a new level of control. Now everyone is admin-enabled and can administer file access controls and file expiration dates when they send files, deciding who can download files via the secure link and how long those links are active. And, of course, IT benefits with up-to-date audit trails to ensure the security of corporate data and files offloaded to boost email performance and reduce storage requirements.

Are U.S. public cloud providers European data-centers able to keep your data safe?

On a recent return trip from overseas, I was waiting in the U.S. Immigration line, part of the airport’s preclearance facilities where U.S. Immigration agents do the full check before you get on the flight, rather than doing all the checks when you land. As the agent was checking my passport, and giving me that look that you know Immigration agents are trained for years on, it got me wondering about legal jurisdictions; what if, after passing through this immigration check while waiting in the boarding area, someone committed a crime, who arrests them? Someone from the U.S.? Someone from the host country? What does this have to do with content in the public cloud?

One of the big challenges in information governance, for our non-U.S. based clients, is legal jurisdiction, especially in regards to the U.S. Patriot Act. Most foreign countries have existing information management regulations that require various types of information (financial, personal, confidential, privileged, etc.) to be secured and stored in data centers located on their sovereign soil to protect information from the legal reach of foreign entities, particularly being subject to the U.S. Patriot Act.

With the many technology shifts impacting and keeping enterprise IT swamped these days; cloud, mobile, CoIT and others, items like governance seem to get lost a bit in the chaos. For most U.S., public cloud-based providers, their initial response is to open data centers in countries where sovereign soil regulations exist, therefore the data remains in the originating country and the complexity brought on by the U.S. Patriot Act is circumvented. Information and files can now be freely exchanged and shared within the borders of the host country, out of the way of the prying eyes of foreign entities.  At least in theory that sounds right… errrr, but well, not really, and that’s the big elephant in the room that non U.S. based companies are awakening to.

According to a recent article in Forbes, the premise U.S. based, public cloud providers are going by is startlingly false. Data centers owned by U.S. companies on foreign soil are NOT exempt from the U.S. Patriot Act.  The U.S. Patriot Act is designed to explicitly extend to all data held by U.S. companies and their non-U.S. based subsidiaries. What this means is, any data held in any U.S. public cloud service provider’s subsidiary is still accessible by U.S. Government agencies under the U.S. Patriot Act, a violation of many countries’ governing information management regulations.

With more and more enterprise data and customer records moving into the public cloud (intentionally or not) enterprises need to dig a bit deeper to understand if they are inadvertently violating regulations within their home country. At Accellion, we recommend to our non U.S. customers that they either deploy an on-premise, private cloud, file sharing solution, or consider using a hosted data center, owned and managed by an operator in their country with a virtual Accellion implementation (VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen Server). In that way, non U.S. enterprises can be confident that their data is meeting the strictest guidelines of their country’s information management regulations – your protected data stays your protected data, out of reach of foreign entities’ legal jurisdiction.

Oh, and for those of you reading to know what happens if you get arrested at the airport after pre-clearance,  it’s the hosting country’s laws that are enforced. The U.S. has no legal jurisdiction and U.S. Immigration agents can’t arrest you, though they can prevent you from boarding a flight back to the U.S.   Safe travels!