Archive for the ‘Collaboration’ Category

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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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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration | No Comments »

Get Ahead of the Curve with Cloud based Collaboration

Thursday, January 24th, 2013

According to analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group, the enterprise cloud based file sharing revolution is being driven not by IT, but by end users – individuals who need to access and share data across laptops, smart phones and tablets whenever the need may arise. And, it’s these individuals who often subscribe to consumer-based file sharing solutions on their own and then bring those tools into the enterprise to support business use – creating a data security nightmare for IT.

This situation has IT playing catch up, yet many organizations are hesitant to embrace cloud services. Why? ESG found that 43 percent of organizations are worried about data security and privacy concerns and 32 percent about giving up too much control. Ironically, without a proper file sharing solution in place, users are calling the shots, creating the same security risks and a lack of control that’s been holding them back from the cloud in the first place.

In a new white paper, Evaluating Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration Solutions, ESG advised organizations to find a single, secure file sharing and collaboration solution that they can confidently endorse and provides a checklist of what to ask during the due diligence process, including:

  • •Can we sync data across end point devices when offline?
  • • Can users easily search for files across synched directory trees?
  • • Can we support files of any size?
  • • Can we set group policies from a central dashboard?
  • • Is there Active Directory integration?
  • • Is it easy to de-provision accounts?
  • • Is data encrypted in transit and at rest?
  • • Are there remote wiping capabilities?
  • • Is the data center SAS 70 Type II certified?
  • • Is data replicated remotely in the event of site failure?

To help you make a smart investment that’s right for your company, download the complete recommended checklist today.

P.S. Accellion answers “yes” to all of the questions above.

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Posted in Accellion, BYOD, Cloud, Collaboration, Data Security, Mobile | No Comments »

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 »

An Accellion Thanksgiving!

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

An article in CIO reminds us all of the importance of information sharing and collaboration in successful organizations. The need to share and collaborate is not new at all. We can go back to 1620 when a boat filled with more than one hundred people sailed across the Atlantic to settle the New World.

The first winter for the Pilgrims was very difficult because they had arrived too late to plant crops. However, next spring Native Americans shared valuable information about native crops. In the autumn of 1621, the colonists harvested plentiful crops of corn, barley, beans and pumpkins. The colonists had much to be thankful for, and a feast was planned. The local Indians brought deer to roast with turkey and other wild game. This spirit of sharing and collaboration between the Pilgrims and Indians made it possible for the early settlers to prosper in the New World.

Today many businesses thrive on the same “need to share” mindset that the Indians and Native Americans demonstrated back in 1620.

In this season of sharing, Accellion has a few tips for sharing corporate information securely with colleagues, customers, partners, and vendors in order to create more productive enterprises.

1. Choose a secure file sharing solution that is simple enough for employees to use, but secure enough for IT. When secure file sharing is easy, employees make it as part of their daily routine and organizations encourage it.

2. Find a mobile file sharing solution that integrates with your existing enterprise IT infrastructure, including SharePoint, iManage, active directory, archiving systems, mobile device management and data loss prevention (DLP) systems. When secure file sharing works along-side existing applications, no one loses out. Investments are not wasted.

3.Implement a solution that enables secure file sharing across corporate boundaries. When both internal and external users securely collaborate on projects, information shared among partners, vendors, and suppliers is protected.

4. Select a solution that provides native applications for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices to securely view, share and edit content on-the-go. When mobile file sharing is ubiquitous, there is no excuse for using unsecure workarounds.

5. Select a solution that provides the audit trails and reporting required to demonstrate compliance with industry and government regulations such as PCI, SOX, and HIPAA. When organizations need to not only protect sensitive data, but also demonstrate compliance, sophisticated reporting is a must have feature.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Accellion Team!

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

Losing ZZZ’s Over BYOC

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

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?

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

What I Don’t Love About SharePoint

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Accellion

A recent article in Fierce Content Management entitled “Survey finds many users blow by SharePoint security” reveals how cavalier some Microsoft SharePoint users are about maintaining security within the widely used Enterprise collaboration and content management solution.  According to the SharePoint security survey conducted by Cryptzone, an IT threat mitigation company, 92% of respondents said they knew that taking content out of SharePoint created a security risk; still 30% were willing to take that risk for the sake of convenience.  Even more eye-opening was that 43% took sensitive content out of SharePoint to work at home and 55% said they did that to give material to someone without access to SharePoint.

There’s a clear need to be able to share files externally from SharePoint that is not currently being addressed in many organizations.

To effectively collaborate today, users need to easily share content securely within their organization and with external partners across the firewall. But in order to securely share data with outside parties, organizations need to create a secure file sharing system within their SharePoint environment.  Unfortunately, it is not easy or inexpensive to build an external-facing SharePoint server farm.

In order to open up content in SharePoint to external users, IT needs to provision a license and also set up external facing SharePoint servers on the DMZ.  This is an expensive proposition. So organizations usually bypass setting up external SharePoint servers.  This often leads employees to create work-arounds rather than taking the time to put in IT requests.  However, this is a data breach waiting to happen.  Once a document leaves SharePoint “illegally” the ability to track and manage the file is compromised.  This is particularly important in industries subject to HIPAA and other regulatory compliance.

There is a solution to this problem for organizations who want to make the most of their SharePoint investment.  Accellion offers a plug-in for SharePoint that enables users to quickly, easily, and securely share any size file from within the SharePoint Document Library to both internal and external recipients.  The plug-in not only makes it easy to share files across the corporate firewall but also provides easy-to-use file tracking and reporting required to meet industry and government regulations such as HIPAA, SOX and GLBA.

So if your organization has made an investment in SharePoint but you haven’t yet implemented external sharing of SharePoint documents for your users please give us a call.   As the Cryptzone survey illustrated if a solution isn’t provided for external file sharing from SharePoint then users will come up with their own solution and security isn’t typically top of their list of requirements.

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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, SharePoint | 3 Comments »

Deck your iPad with Accellion for the Holidays

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

At this point I don’t think Charles Dickens’s character Ebenezer Scrooge would say “Bah, humbug!” to an iPad for the holidays. A recent Nielsen survey shows that our appetite for Apple devices is growing – with the iPad leading the pack. Twenty-four percent of adult consumers want an iPad this holiday season. That’s up six percent from last year. With demand so high this year Apple is sure to break its record of 6.35 millioniPads sold last holiday season.

With many of these new holiday iPads destined for dual usage, both personal and business, the Accellion team has been working overtime on the latest version of Accellion Secure Mobile App for iOS. Now available for download, just in time for the holidays, the new Accellion Mobile App version (2.1) is a universal app for iPhone and iPad.  My favorite new feature – the cool split screen view for the iPad – but check out all the great features for securely accessing business information on the go including:

• Encrypted mobile access to files
• Securely view, share, and send files on-the-go
• Download, save, edit, and upload files from the mobile device safely and securely
• Add comments on files to collaborate with colleagues
• Subscribe to notifications to receive real-time file and workspace updates

Download the app here to experience the new features, today.

As always, we love your feedback so leave us your thoughts below on the updated app!

Accellion Mobile app

 

Elmer-Dewitt, P. (2010, December 30). Retrieved from http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/30/how-big-was-apples-ipad-christmas/

Nielson wire blog. (2011, November 17). Retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/us-kids-looking-forward-to-iholiday-2011/

Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Security, Mobile | No Comments »

The Mobile Offensive! BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Mobile employees have been worrying IT managers for years. It all started with pagers, PDAs, and the first cellular phones. Now iPads, smartphones, and a slew of other Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices are on track to outnumber desktop computers. The local area network (LAN) that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, computer lab, or office building is fading fast. Most enterprise networks are moving to wireless as the primary way to connect. In the same way that video killed the radio star; Wi-Fi enabled devices and the BYOD trend are killing the LAN. Mobile devices that were restricted by IT managers are now considered indispensible for everyday operations.

Do you think the BYOD trend is not real, or a fad? According to ZDNET, about 75% of enterprises now have a “bring your own device” policy in place. That’s nearly three-quarters of companies surveyed—so yeah BYOD is for real.

A quarter of organizations give employees a whitelist of allowed devices, while almost half let employees bring in and use any device.

  

Bring Your Own Device? It’s real. Nearly three-quarters of companies allow employee-owned smartphones and/or tablets to be used at work, according to Aberdeen data (mix of late 2010 and 2011 surveys). A quarter give employees a whitelist of allowed devices, while almost half let employees bring in and use any device.

Here are four trends that motivate companies to try BYOD:

Employee gratification: device lust is no longer just for tech geeks. Employees love BYOD at work. Allowing BYOD can be a real motivational tool. Employees, particularly younger, on-the-move employees, see the brand of a laptop or smartphone as a lifestyle choice and an important part of who they are. Of course Apple is at the epicenter of this movement.

Tech developments: the days of compatibility problems and sharing issues from Mac to Windows are ancient history. A few anti-trust lawsuits got everyone’s attention and a solution was found. The compatibility problems were one thing. In the past the size, weight, and cost of computers made mobile computing an oxymoron.  In 1983 BYOD would not have been possible. This 29 pound BASF 7000 computer would have been nearly impossible to bring to work.  Today’s shinny mobile devices are easy to transport and don’t weight a ton.

Telecommuting and mobile workers:  some of the same technical developments listed above enable more and more workers to work from home, remotely, or on-the-go. Other technical developments like secure file transfer and secure collaboration allow external employees to be productive and secure.

Cost: back in the good old days a computer like the BASF 7000 would have hurt your back and strained your IT budget. At $2800 ($6000 at today’s dollar) this beast of burden cost an arm and a leg. Just think about that next time your fingers are deftly gliding across your light weight tablet or smartphone. With the cost of laptops and tablets around $500 the cost factor, like the BASF 7000, is a thing of the past.

At Accellion we see the BYOD trend as a shift in the increasing demand for mobile access to file sharing. If you haven’t already tried out the Accellion mobile apps here is the link.

 

Aberdeen 2011 Wireless Expense Management: Control International Roaming and the BYOD Revolution. The multimedia content can be viewed at: http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/7240/RA-wireless-expense-management.aspx

Lai, E. (2011). 75% of enterprises have ‘bring your own device’ policies. what that means. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/75-of-enterprises-have-bring-your-own-device-policies-what-that-means-charts/1025

The Buggles. (1979). Video killed the radio star [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Accellion, Automation, Collaboration, Data Security, Mobile | 1 Comment »

Accellion and MobileIron Announce Partnership

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Most IT organizations have minimal visibility into what’s on an employee’s phone and how it’s being used, and even less control or insight into information being accessed and shared.

MobileIronand Accellion announced a partnership today to provide our customers with secure mobile device and content management. Together, MobileIron and Accellion help an IT organization to regain control over mobile devices and how employees collaborate and share information from them.

As part of the partnership, Accellion will be one of only seven applications chosen to participate in MobileIron’s AppConnect program.  The goal of AppConnect is to secure MobileIron-developed apps as well as third-party apps on the App Store, Android Market and other mobile app services.

The benefit of the Accellion and MobileIron partnership was summed up by Jason Otani, Director, IT Infrastructure, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, a mutual customer:

Using Accellion Secure Collaboration’s native mobile apps, our teams really appreciate being able to securely collaborate on contracts and engineering plans with internal and external business partners.  MobileIron’s ability to wipe the device clean remotely any time a device is lost or stolen adds another level of security protection against a possible data breach.

For the most up-to-date news and information about this partnership, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Breach, Data Security, Government, Healthcare, Mobile, Product, Virtualization | No Comments »

Catering to the Sophisticated User: Make that a “babe-a-ccino”

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to tap into the toddler market with a specialty mock coffee drink aptly called the “babe-a-ccino.” Yes, no kidding, there is the photo in the WSJ this morning of a young man, clutching his morsel of croissant, or is it a chai lavendar biscuit, with his “babe-a-ccino.” Invitingly presented in a classic espresso cup, the “babe-a-ccino” seems to consist of frothy milk, a sprinkle of cocoa, and only the suggestion of coffee.

Jack, age 2, drinks a babe-a-ccino at the Seesaw cafe in San Francisco – WSJ

So what exactly does this have to do with business users and software?  Well it’s an interesting example of understanding your audience and catering to their wants and needs.  For the under five year old crowd it tends to be 99% about wants, and depending on the business user it may be the same.  In the case of the “babe-a-ccino” the toddler wants what Mommy or Daddy has, however what they need is a big glass of milk.  Enter the “babe-a-ccino” an excellent compromise between what toddler wants – cute cup, frothy milk and a teaspoon to play with – and what they need which is a decent serving of milk.

Let’s face it, today’s business users are sophisticated in their wants and needs. With easy access to free software they are pushing the envelope on the types of solutions they are bringing into the workplace.  What they want is easy access to information, from any device, easy file sharing with colleagues and outside partners and easy collaboration. What they also need is security and tracking so they stay out of trouble.

It’s hard being a parent but someone has to do it.  Sorry kid.  No, you can’t have a coffee drink.  Not least because I don’t want to deal with you when you are bouncing off the walls later from the caffeine.  Similarly, for the business user: sorry, but no, you cannot use Dropbox for sharing confidential work information.  Not least because no one has a record of what you are doing, and I don’t want to lose my job because of a data breach.  Now comes the big pout.

Enter the “babe-a-ccino.”  Now everyone’s happy.  Kid gets what they want, Mom and Dad are happy too. Consider Accellion the “babe-a-ccino” of file sharing.  It gives the business user what they want, while giving IT/Security teams what they need. Everyone’s happy.

I’ll take my “babe-a-ccino” to go, thanks.

Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Security, Product | No Comments »

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