Archive for the ‘Email Attachments’ Category

« Older Entries

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Email Attachments, Product | No Comments »

Customer Spotlight: Texas Juvenile Justice Department takes action to protect youth data.

Tuesday, August 14th, 2012

For the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD), the ability to communicate quickly and securely makes all the difference for the youth they serve. Operating dozens of treatment facilities, correctional institutions and halfway houses throughout the state, TJJD needed a way for its 2,500 employees to share confidential data efficiently and reliably between parents, medical staff and legal counsel.

Before switching to Accellion, staff members often turned to mailing hard copies of documents, burning CDs, or encrypting individual emails in order to work around a cumbersome file transfer and encryption mechanism provided by a dedicated TLS link. TJJD clearly needed a better option, fast.

After undergoing rigorous testing, Accellion was successfully deployed at TJJD, and the number of licenses has since grown from 100 to 600. Josh Kuntz, ISO with TJJD, cites the user-friendly nature of the Accellion solution as the driving force behind this rapid growth.

“Adoption of Accellion has taken off because it allows users to work as they always have,” said Kuntz. “It looks email and acts like email, making it a no-brainer to use.”

TJJD staff members from medical services employees to legal counsel and case workers are now using the Accellion solution to securely share confidential youth data, meeting the requirements of new legislation such as Texas Family Code, Chapter 58, which requires TJJD maintain the integrity of all juvenile justice information. The solution has also been invaluable for community interactions, allowing TJJD employees to better communicate with family members.

“95 percent of our data must be kept confidential for one reason or another, driving us to find a secure mode to exchange information with parents, between staff members, and with the community at large,” said Kuntz. “Accellion was the only solution that met our strict security guidelines, yet made it easy for non-technical individuals to use.”

Click here to read the full case study.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Data Security, Email Attachments, Government | No Comments »

“The Met” Safeguards The Olympic Torch

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

 

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…

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Data Security, Email Attachments, UK | No Comments »

Bringing the Tour De France to Your Living Room

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

With the 99th Tour de France underway, Australians are paying special attention to the daily rankings, with all eyes on native, Cadel Evans. He captured the title last year (the first Australian to earn the honor), leaving many to wonder – can he pull out the victory two years in a row?

For Aussies looking to track who’s gaining ground and who’s losing steam, most turn to one broadcasting source: SBS Television. SBS is on location in France, filming highlights throughout all 3,497 kilometers in order to provide viewers with compelling daily footage. And, Accellion helps make it happen.

How? SBS broadcast teams on-site in France capture video of Tour activities; files are sent to the editing and productions staff in Sydney via Accellion Secure File Transfer; and SBS creates timely programming content. It’s sharing that’s simple, safe, and seamless which is why SBS has relied on us for years to support programming processes for both the Tour de France and the FIFA World Cup. We’re honored to play such an important role in two renowned worldwide events and when the new Tour champion is announced on July 22, we’ll definitely be watching. For more information, download the case study

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Data Security, Email Attachments | No Comments »

How Protected is Your Brand from a Virus?

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Your brand reaches far beyond your logo, tagline and website – encompassing all interactions with current and potential customers, and often boiling down to how professional (and pleasant) it is to do business with you. How you communicate with investors, partners, and prospects says a lot about your company and helps you create a rapport and level of trust with those critical to your company’s success. The last thing you want is an employee sharing a file from their mobile device and inadvertently also sharing a virus with a valued customer, contaminating external recipients along with all you’ve done to build your company’s brand.

Continuing our discussion about the risks of the growing Bring Your Own Device trend, employees are sharing files from any number of mobile devices and antivirus protection needs to follow suit. According to Juniper Networks’ 2011 Mobile Threats Report, there was a 155 percent increase in malware on mobile platforms in 2011 as compared to the previous year.

But, just because mobile malware is on the rise, doesn’t mean your risks have to increase at the same pace. If your employees are sharing files, you need the ability to run antivirus – on any device, at any time – before the document goes out. It seems like a no-brainer, but vendors such as Box, Dropbox, and SugarSync would disagree, with Gartner’s new “Mobile File Synchronization Evaluation Criteria” report (May 2012) showing all three in the “No” category when it comes to offering antivirus on mobile files.

More mobile devices plus more malware has to equal a file sharing device that comes with antivirus protection. Does Accellion offer antivirus? The answer is a resounding “yes” as no enterprise file sharing solution is secure without it.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Data Security, Email Attachments | 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 »

Learning from Morgan Stanley’s Data Breach

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

“Morgan Stanley Admits to Loss of Unencrypted CDs” reads the latest data breach headline in SC Magazine. I can’t help but shake my head as this could have been easily avoided.  The lost information contained 34,000 client account and social security numbers, among other confidential data.  The CDs were delivered in tact to the New York State department of taxation and finance’s mail room and disappeared somewhere between there and the intended recipient’s hands.

IT departments worry about data security and do their best to put systems in place to prevent this kind of data breach.  So how does it happen?  Some of the biggest risks come from employees who work around an IT mandated solution.  In this case, it looks like there was a file too large for either Morgan Stanley’s, the recipient’s, or both systems’ email restrictions.  For the employee who opted to mail the unencrypted CD, the magnitude of the potential loss and risk involved may have never crossed their minds or took a backseat to Getting the Job Done.

You, as an IT professional, can easily save the day and provide a way for your users to share information and collaborate securely.

In addition to banning CDs, thumbdrives, free dropbox-type of applications, FTP or USB sticks, implementing secure file sharing technology such as Accellion’s helps enterprises securely share files in a way that can be seamless to employees and their intended recipients.  With Accellion, you can track and manage who has sent and downloaded what file, where, and via what device.

Since Accellion supports any file format and size, I suspect Morgan Stanley’s CDs were used to transfer files an Accellion user would’ve been able to send easily.  With Accellion, shared files are stored securely on a server, so issues with the recipients’ email storage limits are also bypassed.  And the file is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Some of the world’s leading financial services organizations use Accellion to protect their sensitive data including: AEW Capital Management, American Capital, Australian Unity, Bank of Scotland, Bank of Spain-Miami (Banco Santander), Cigna WorldWide Insurance Company, Covenant Bank, Deloitte & Touche CA, Georgia Bank and Trust, Farmers Insurance Group, Federal Credit Union, HeathMarkets, IMA Financial Group, Inc., KPMG, MIB Solutions, PFS Global Ltd., Princeton Financial Systems, United Community Bank, ViewPoint Bank and Xpress Holding to name a few.

Financial services firms need to protect their sensitive data in a way that’s easy-to-use for employees and easy-to-manage for IT staff.  Accellion solutions can help.

Posted in Accellion, Data Breach, Data Security, Email Attachments, Financial, FTP | 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 | 1 Comment »

Accellion in Action: HIT Entertainment’s Enterprise Deployment

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

When you think of Barney, Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine, enterprise software isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind, but today Accellion announced that the company behind these widely cherished children’s entertainment brands, HIT Entertainment, has implemented a virtual, enterprise-wide deployment of Accellion Secure File Transfer.

 

HIT Entertainment Protects their Brands with Accellion

The press release goes on to detail:

“HIT Entertainment is responsible for well-known programmes such as Bob the Builder, Thomas & Friends and Fireman Sam, and has a pressing need to protect its intellectual property when sending so many files to its offices across the world,” said James Herbert, HIT Entertainment’s Senior Manager of Global Infrastructure.

Accellion originally replaced FTP as the main method for file transfer at HIT Entertainment, a way of working that was cumbersome, not secure and led to an additional management overhead. After three years, the company was ready to commit for a longer period with Accellion. “The product is easy to run,” said Herbert, “it virtually manages itself.”

Well known brands need to protect their intellectual property in a way that’s easy-to-use for employees and easy-to-manage for IT staff.  Accellion solutions can help.

Posted in Accellion, Email Attachments, UK, Virtualization | No Comments »

Accellion in Action: National Park Service

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

The Federal Times ran an article yesterday on how IT organizations can make information sharing easier by giving end users more control.  The article featured an interview with Accellion’s customer, The U.S. National Park Service.  An excerpt is here:

The National Park Service has some 140 projects in the works thanks to stimulus spending — everything from Everglades restoration in Florida to the rehabilitation of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.

All these projects come with paperwork. Documents, drawings, maps and blueprints all must be shared by architects, engineers, construction teams and management partners. E-mail won’t cut it, said Edie Ramey, division chief of information management at the Park Service’s Denver Service Center. Files are too big, security too uncertain and recipient lists too hard to keep current.

The Park Service solves the problem with a mix of technologies. It uses secure file transfer software from Accellion of Palo Alto, Calif., to manage the motion of so many very large documents, then makes the end product accessible in SharePoint for all the relevant parties to share.

The solution solves two integral questions in the world of collaboration: who gets in and who stays out.

“It’s all about the security,” Ramey said. “We used to have something that was basically a big old file-share. Anyone could get in with a generic password and address. They would have access to any files on the [shared space], not just their project files that I would give them permission to see.”

More and more we are seeing IT organizations work to provision their employees and external collaborators with  easy-to-use tools to increase productivity, while ensuring the enterprise organization the security protection it needs. With Accellion, this can be done easily while making the most of investments IT organizations have already made in technologies like SharePoint.

This means the US National Park Service can enjoy securely sharing information almost as much as we enjoy U.S. National Parks.

Posted in Data Security, Email Attachments, FTP, Government | No Comments »

« Older Entries