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As a professed news junkie, I am always scouring the web for the latest political, economic and technology news.  One particular trend that I’ve noticed in the past year or two is the convergence of consumer and enterprise technologies. Consumer products have added support, limited security and integration hooks as a way of garnering adoption in the enterprise.   Conversely, many enterprise solutions have adopted innovative consumer-centric features to make their products more user-friendly.  A great example is chat.  Skype started off in the consumer space and has moved into corporate environment as a way to increase business productivity.

Another technology that has seen applications in both the consumer and enterprise space is secure file transfer.   Numerous companies offer file transfer technologies but they are far from equal.  The level of sophistication, robustness and security required for an enterprise secure file transfer solution continues to be quite different than one for the consumer space.  With an alphabet soup of regulations, companies need to be careful about the technologies they use to securely transfer confidential financial data, health records, legal documents and more.  Consumer-centric solutions allow individual employees to send files without any corporate or IT control, and that can leave companies vulnerable to security violations.  There is nothing worse than finding out that your company is on the 10 o’clock news due to lost confidential data.  That’s a PR nightmare everyone can easily avoid.

The Accellion Secure File Transfer solution provides its customers with the security, tracking and reporting tools necessary to demonstrate compliance.   Companies can safely allow the transfer of files between employees, employees and outside vendors,  and through automated business processes.  With Accellion; administrators have a system by which all files sent via Accellion Secure Transfer contain audit trails for compliance.

At the Techonomy conference last week in Lake Tahoe, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, mentioned the stunning soundbite ”There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing.”

Woweee that’s a lot of bytes, and I thought it was just me drowning in data.

PCWorld in its article “Prepare for Data Tsumani, Warns Google CEO” featured this quote and focussed on the “incomprehensible amounts of data out there about all of us…” and the privacy concerns.

I’m still stuck on the sheer volume of data.  1 exabyte is equivalent to 1 quillion bytes or

1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 B = 10¹⁸ bytes = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes

Managing and controlling this volume of information, not to mention securing the confidential bits, is a non-trivial undertaking and based on Mr. Schmidt’s prediction, the task is only going to get bigger.  Just as organizations equipped employees with their own telephones, and then email accounts, and then mobile phones, the time has come to equip each employee with a secure file transfer account so that they can move information quickly and securely with the necessary organizational tracking and reporting for compliance.

Accellion customers are already weathering the data tsunami, transferring Terabytes of data per month via Accellion secure file transfer.

5 exabytes in 2 days – bring it on.