Archive for the ‘Collaboration’ Category

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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 | 1 Comment »

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 | No Comments »

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.

MobileIron and 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 »

What’s next? Constant Reinvention.

Thursday, July 28th, 2011

What’s next?  I was inspired to consider this question today after reading John D. Halamka’s blog entry on Life as a Heathcare CIO.

If you’re not familiar with his work, John Halamka is, an MD, MS, and is Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chief Information Officer at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, a full Professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing Emergency Physician.  He is also a long time Accellion customer and has implemented Accellion’s secure file sharing at both BIDMC and Harvard Medical School.  You can read more about his implementation of Accellion in this eWeek article.

Given the scope of his career, it seems like he must ask himself the “What’s Next?” question a lot.  On his blog he answers it.  What’s next?  Constant Reinvention.  He recently announced he is going to step down as CIO of Harvard Medical School, help them find a fulltime replacement for the role and embrace the next reinvention of his career.  About the next phase of his career he states:

It’s July of 2011… and I feel powerful forces are aligning to create a quantum leap forward in electronic health records and health information exchange technology.

We think he’s right.  Healthcare organizations are struggling with the growing use of mobile devices and unmanaged Dropbox-type of solutions in their enterprise and need to secure, manage and audit the mobile sharing of electronic health records, research and other Protected Health Information (PHI).  They know this problem puts the organization at risk for non-compliance with HIPAA and Hitech. The organization could also run the risk of a serious data breach, making news headlines, and incurring hefty regulatory fines.

Accellion’s healthcare customers tend to be more savvy than most and care about offering their staff easy to use file sharing and collaboration applications while still securing and managing sensitive patient and research data.

Accellion is constantly introducing new products and features, and the market continues to have new problems to solve – unmanaged Dropbox-type of solutions in the enterprise, proliferation of new mobile devices.  Asking “What’s Next?” helps us all to thrive and innovate.

So, thanks John for providing today’s inspiration and we wish you luck for your next reinvention.

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

Accellion in Action: Seattle Children’s Hospital

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

A recent issue of Research Practitioner Magazine includes the article, “Collaboration Moves Research, Clinical Knowledge” and talks about the importance of medical researchers reaching out to potential collaborators, nearby and globally, as they work on ground-breaking medical research.

For more than 100 years, one such facility, Seattle Children’s Hospital, has provided inpatient, outpatient, diagnostic, surgical, rehabilitative, behavioral, emergency and outreach services to children from infancy through young adulthood.  Part of Seattle Children’s Hospital, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, has nine major centers, and is internationally recognized for its work in cancer, genetics, immunology, pathology, infectious disease, injury prevention and bioethics.

Accellion customer Wes Wright, Chief Technology Officer at Seattle Children’s, weighed in on how Seattle Children’s uses file transfer and collaboration technology from Accellion to facilitate their research.

Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington struggled sending secure files through a difficult-to-use secure file transfer protocol server and using email encryption. Less than a year ago, however, the hospital and foundation switched to a Web-based program, one that offers encryption, user tracking, and transfer of large data files. The program is offered by Accellion, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

The switch to the new file transfer system was spurred primarily by research needs, says Wes Wright, vice president and chief technology officer at Seattle Children’s. “We put the solution in to help us transfer data files for research, but it has since spread out among the whole organization.” After the purchase, the system took only took about three weeks to implement.

About 4,800 employees use the system now… the reason is the simplicity of the plug-in, Wright says. If a user wants to transfer a file, he opens Microsoft Outlook and chooses new mail. In the right-hand corner of the new mail is a plug-in that says “Accellion.” “You hit that button and it opens a file browse window. You browse to the file you want and attach it.”

…The system also tracks who has downloaded and looked at each file. “Whenever anyone accesses a particular file, we keep a log of it,” he says. Sometimes researchers send the file to themselves and download it on their home systems so they can work at home. “We know that user X sent it to himself and then downloaded it when he got home. We can keep track of that file and where it went.”

Such technology is “the wave of the future with HIPAA and high-tech regulations and rules,” Wright says. “The easier we can make it to securely share and collaborate among researchers, it’s going to be a research differentiator.”

We’re so proud Seattle Children’s Hospital staff and research team use Accellion to help move such important work forward.

Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Security, Email Attachments, Healthcare, HIPAA, Mobile | No Comments »

Lord of the Files – File Sharing Gone Wild

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Who would have thought that the novel, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, an English literature staple for English schoolchildren, was not only the idea behind the popular TV series “Lost”, but also provides important parallels to the story currently unfolding of enterprise file sharing gone wild.  In the Lord of the Flies the attempts by the group of British schoolboys to govern themselves when stranded on a deserted island is in some ways akin to how business users are today attempting to govern their file sharing when deserted by IT.

The major themes of the Lord of the Flies include an exploration of the conflicts of civilization and the loss of innocence, both of which seem applicable to the current conflict of business user vs. IT in the world of enterprise file sharing.  While the novel, and even the TV show, may be rather more graphic on the conflict of living by rules vs. savagery, valuing the good of the group vs. individual gratification and exploring law vs. anarchy perhaps some good lessons can be learned?  Just how would Ralph, Jack, Simon and Piggy, the main characters in Lord of the Flies have handled file sharing?

Ralph, the elected leader of the group, the representative of order, civilization and productivity, thinks about how the boys should organize themselves and get to work to maximize their chance of survival and rescue.  Is Ralph perhaps the CIO figure?  Would Ralph, the CIO, be taking charge, implementing an enterprise file sharing solution so business users can not only survive and can get their jobs done, but also stay out of trouble.

Jack, the opposite of Ralph, the character representing savagery not civilization, demonstrates how he can use his savagery to control the boys who increasingly abandon civilization to follow him.  Hmmmm… not sure about this Jack character, although we have all seen business users do things they shouldn’t.

Simon, is the character who just does what is right not because of Ralph or Jack’s influence, but just because he knows it is the right thing to do.  This would be the business user every organization would like to have.

Piggy, the inventor and intellectual, uses his inventiveness to benefit the group.  It is Piggy who initially finds a conch and blows it to bring all the boys together on the island and Piggy who makes a sundial so they can tell the time.  Piggy, in the world of enterprise file sharing would have early on blown the conch he discovered, to alert IT and Security teams that they needed to work together to give business users a way to share files securely.  Piggy would also be the one to design and implement the system.

So how does this story end?  In Lord of the Flies, the boys are eventually rescued and returned to civilization, but not without some casualties.  The adult who steps onto the island does remark that he would have expected better from British boys!

How does the story end in enterprise file sharing?  I’m betting on the Ralphs and Simons of the world to give this story a happy ending.

Posted in Accellion, Cloud, Collaboration, Email Attachments, UK | No Comments »

How many of your employees are taking their iPad or iPhone on vacation?

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Leaving the office behind has always been a challenge for some, but the iPad is now making it even harder. As employees head to the beach, mountains, and island getaways how many husbands and wives are sneaking an iPad into their luggage?

With the introduction of the iPad, there has been a surge in the volume of users.  According to information released by Apple for their investor community, close to 25 million iPads have been sold to date.

Many of these iPads are being used for business, and employees are taking advantage of free and low cost cloud-based collaboration solutions to solve their file sharing needs, without adequate security, tracking, or visibility for the organization.

When your employees and their partners are using free, unmanaged cloud-based services to share and sync files, you know your organization is at risk for a data breach, intellectual property theft or non-compliance.  Well, actually, because they’re using these apps and you have no visibility into what they’re doing, maybe you don’t know how exposed your organization is to a data breach.  Consider this instead: how many people in your organization do you think are taking their iPads on vacation with them this summer, and how many plan to access business information on their iPad?  iPads are also attractive targets for thieves and can be accidentally left behind.

Accellion announced today that our native file sharing and collaboration application for the iPad and iPhone have been made available for download off of the App Store in iTunes just in time for school to be out and vacations to begin.  Designed to work with Accellion Secure Collaboration, the Accellion Mobile Apps for iPad and iPhone are now available for download for free from the App Store in iTunes.  Download the app, and know there’s one less thing to worry about before you go on vacation – of course getting caught doing work on vacation might still get you in trouble with your loved ones.  We can’t help you there.

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

What we can learn from our friends in the Government

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Reports from the team who attended GovSec in Washington DC highlighted that there is a lot to be learned from the government sector.  Based on recent conversations, it seems to me, government IT organizations are among the most risk averse of all industry sectors.  Risk adverse organizations are:
o    Proactive; they don’t wait for a data breach to happen, they secure their communications
o    Most likely to have an organization-wide data risk assessment and profile
o    Understand that a true adversary only has to be right once, but your security measures have to be right in every possible way
o    And understand that the most destructive adversary can easily come, accidentally or intentionally, from within the organization.

We’ve seen plenty of high profile, reputation-destroying data breaches this month, including the recent notable addition of Sony to the list.  We’re still waiting for specifics on how many of these data breaches occurred, and the true price Sony will ultimately pay, not just in lost revenue while the network was down, but also in lost future revenue as gamers switch to the competition.

Most organizations wait till a major problem happens, and then take action.  John Pironti, during a recent Accellion-sponsored Enterprise 2.0 webinar, entitled “5 Security Essentials for Collaboration” put it best.  After a data breach, companies,   “fire people, hire a new outside security team, and throw a lot of money at finding a solution.  For six months.  And then attention wanes.”

Maybe it’s because politics is fickle, maybe it’s driven by regulatory compliance, or maybe it’s because government – federal, state and local agencies have seen the repercussions of data breaches and have digested tough lessons from their peers.  Whatever the reason, we have seen robust growth in this segment, with new Accellion government wins across the globe, from The Bahamas to Western Australia, from governing bodies to law enforcement agencies.  Organizations have to react once a data breach or noncompliance occurs, but it’s great to able to point to some good news and a market segment that’s being proactive.

 

Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Breach, Data Security, Government, UK | No Comments »

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