Faculty, students and staff need to be able to easily collaborate, exchange ideas, and share data including student records, faculty and staff employee information, academic work and research data. However FaceBook, MySpace, IM, P2P and USB sticks are not the answer for secure file transfer.

We’ve had an educational initiative program at Accellion for a number of years that provides free student licenses to any educational institution that purchases licenses for all its faculty and staff.  Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley (Go Bears), University of Chicago, University of Tennesse, Pepperdine, Texas A&M, Kent State, University of Colorado are just a few of the universities using Accellion secure file transfer.

It’s never too early or too late to learn how to send files securely. No matter whether your users are students or employees, Accellion wants everyone to get an A grade for file transfer security so we are offering an Accellion Back to School promotion for purchases made before September 30,2010.  Contact Accellion sales at sales@accellion.com or 650 739 0095 before September 15, 2010 for details.

The story features some interesting quotes from Matthew Yeager, identified as a data storage expert from the UK, including:

“sending an email attachment of 4.7 megabytes creates as much greenhouse gas as boiling your tea kettle 17.5 times.”

You have to hand it to the English – they can reduce the complexity of the Internet and the global debate on greenhouse gases down to the topic of brewing a cup of tea.

While Yeager didn’t go into the details of his tea kettle calculation – many commenters have, including Anonymous, who provided the following:

According to PBS Roughscience, a standard kitchen kettle takes about 2000 Watts of electrical power. Thus, 17.5 × 2 kW = 35 kW. But that’s power (P), not energy (E = P×T) over time period T. If it takes about 10 mins to boil a kettle then, 2 kW / 6 = 0.33 kWh per boil.

If a typical British kitchen kettle is assumed to hold 1.5 liters, that’s about 6.34 US coffee cups, according to Google convert. According to General Electric, brewing 3 pots of coffee (6 cups) requires 1 kWh of energy. So, 1 brew (or 1 kettle boil) takes about 0.33 kWh, which seems consistent.

The controversy seems to arise from whether the claimed 35kW per email is a reasonable number or not.  As one IT manager commented

“Now I know our server room is warm, but the damn thing would melt if it was using that much energy.”

While nobody disputes that email attachments take up storage, and that redundancy, backups, and sharing of email attachments explodes the storage requirements, what does seem to be up for debate is the scale of the energy consumption.  As of today, Mr Yeager hasn’t come forward to explain or revise his estimate, which might explain why this story keeps circulating.

I think I need to sit down with a cuppa to think this one through.

So to keep things simple, the answer is YES to both questions.

Do These Jeans Make My Diaper Look Big? The answer is YES.

Do These Files Make My Email Look Big? The answer is YES.

Very similar to the idea of squeezing a large diaper clad child into a pair of skinny jeans, large files just don’t belong attached to emails. It looks uncomfortable, it is uncomfortable, and your IT manager just might throw a tantrum.

Whoever dreamed up skinny jeans as a fashion statement certainly didn’t have a diaper-clad child in mind.  Similarly email wasn’t designed for large file attachments. As with many things in life – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  This applies equally to diaper clad children wearing skinny jeans and large files attached to email.

So our Accellion tip for today is – respect your email and don’t attach large files.  That’s what Accellion secure file transfer is for.

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.

” … 10MB Email attachments should go the way of the fax. Only for dinosaurs.”

Anyone who has recently spent any period of time with a child under the age of five will no doubt be up on the topic of dinosaurs. Amazing creatures, and hard to believe they once roamed the earth.  They came both big and small.  This got me thinking.

If large email attachments are heading the way of the dinosaurs, could files have a dinosaur equivalent, and what might that look like?

Is a 5MB email attachment equivalent to a Stegosaurus?  Would a 10MB attachment be a Tyrannosaurus?  20GB a Diplodocus?

I’m never quite going to be able to view email attachments the same way.  In future when I read complaints on twitter regarding email attachments I’m going to substitute the dinosaur equivalents…

“What kind of person sends an email with a Triceratops attached?  Three times.”

I could have some fun with this.

We couldn’t believe how busy our booth was in New Orleans. We spoke with prospects from across the country and met with so many of our existing customers. It’s always nice to put faces with customer names.

Our days were filled with conversations with attendees about secure file transfer and with our new demos showcasing our new plug-ins for the Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure (BPI) and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) – including plug-ins for Outlook 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

We’re already looking forward to Tech Ed next year. See you in Atlanta!

Mary Nicknish, Accellion Product Manager

It began easily enough.  Click the Safari icon in the lower left corner to open a web page on the iPad, and type in the URL of your favorite Accellion web interface.  From there, I logged in using my network credentials (ah, the magic of LDAP integration!).   Seeing the Send File page, I wondered:  who would be the lucky recipient?  Yes, it was the same victim of my Skype chat, our fearless Director of Channel Strategy, Sunita.Reddy@accellion.com.

All was going well until I got to the Select A File button, which did not want to seem to engage for me.  Was it pilot error, or did we have our very first iPad compatibility issue?  Not wanting to trigger a worldwide development alert, I decided instead to use the Request a File button on the Send File page, to allow Sunita to send a file back to me.  She confirmed receipt of my invitation, and we seemed back on track.

Good news followed, as I was able to bring up my Accellion GoogleMail account on the iPad, and saw a new email with a file in my inbox.  A click or two later, and Sunita’s latest presentation on a new Accellion product (sorry, top secret) was quickly downloading to the iPad.

Extending Accellion to new platforms has been a recurring theme during my five years at the company.  Stay tuned…..

David Cain
Vice President, Worldwide Channel Sales
Accellion, Inc.

Here I was thinking this would be an article about the perils of large Powerpoint files, and it was, sorta.  Except this article didn’t focus so much on the size of Powerpoint files but on the content. It seems that no military meeting, report or presentation is now considered complete without a Powerpoint slide deck, consuming numerous hours in the preparation. While several high profile military commanders are fighting back against the “death by Powerpoint” there is no end in sight.

General McChrystal the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was shown a Powerpoint slide in Kabul last summer that is now bouncing around the Internet as an example of Powerpoint gone out of control.  This slide is truly frightening and as General McChrystal dryly remarked ““When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

Rampant “powerpointing” can be a real nuisance for IT departments.  I did a quick check on my computer and many of my powerpoint slide decks are greater than 5MB.  Sending around powerpoint slides to even a modest distribution list can really push the limits on email storage and performance.  With email attachments typically taking up more than 70% of email storage – Powerpoint slide decks are one of the major contributors.

Given the realization that Powerpoints are not going away any time soon –  what can be done to fight back? As a minimum, consider sending Powerpoint slides via Accellion file transfer instead of email attachments so that at least you make your IT department happy.  Also T.X. Hammes Essay entitled “Dumb Dumb Bullets” published in the Armed Forces Journal should be required reading for all military personnel.

It was bad enough that a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing birth dates and criminal record checks was sent unencrypted and without password protection.  To accidentally include in the CC: field, the email address of a journalist at The Register turned this into a high profile data breach.  The Register email address was in the system because it had been used earlier for two unrelated Freedom of Information requests.

IT staff were immediately called in to tighten security measures to avoid similar incidents occurring in the future.  As a minimum that should include a secure file transfer system, content monitoring and filtering and data encryption.

While The Register has cooperated with Gwent Police in deleting the file they did not feel compelled to comply with requests not to mention this story.