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Archive for the ‘Email Attachments’ Category

Accellion in Action: Enterprise Deployment for Hogarth Worldwide

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

Today Accellion announced the recent deployment of Hogarth, another global, enterprise-wide implementation for the Accellion managed file transfer solution.

Part of the WPP advertising group, Hogarth Worldwide provides copy localization for advertising agencies across the group. Clients around the globe rely on Hogarth to translate master creatives in print, TV and digital formats, from English into local languages.

Initially deployed to provide employees with a quick, easy way to share files with external customers, Accellion has quickly become the standard for sharing information internally among Hogarth’s own employees who are located across multiple sites. According to Alex Buchanan, technology operations director for Hogarth, “many of our employees prefer to use the Accellion solution over old ‘drop box’-style solutions as it is much easier to use.”

With encryption and authentication checkpoints, recipients are validated so confidential information is not overexposed. The comprehensive audit trail provided by Accellion was also important to Hogarth for internal and external audits.

Other significant enterprise deployments of Accellion at the WPP advertising group include Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Grey Global and Team Detroit.

Additional information about our Advertising customer deployments can be found here.

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

Facebook e-mail – a new security loophole

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Yesterday’s announcement by Facebook that they are introducing email capabilities should provide organizations with yet one more reason for banning the use of Facebook at work. In the hope that it will raise additional awareness of the security and compliance risk with unmanaged data transfer I posted the following comments at cio.com:

In case you missed it, today Facebook announced the addition of e-mail capabilities for its users. The initial rollout (US only) starts today and will continue over the next few months. One of the most alarming things to note, Facebook says it doesn’t have a set limit on the size of files that can be sent/received via its e-mail. So, if you don’t have a secure, easy way for employees to share large files… watch out, Facebook e-mail can easily become the next insecure IT workaround.

Let’s face it, smart people will find a way to get the job done, and unfortunately, security is often of secondary concern when evaluating IT workarounds. To keep your employees away from the temptation of using insecure IT workarounds – like Facebook – to share confidential corporate files too large to be sent over the e-mail network, deploying an enterprise solution for managing file transfer solution is essential.

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

Mind the Gap – Bridging the Security Gap in Microsoft’s Communication and Collaboration platform

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Microsoft’s Communication and Collaboration platform comprising Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office Communications Server R2 and Microsoft SharePoint streamlines how organizations connect people, processes and information. Microsoft SharePoint alone boasts 100MM+ users. Throw in Exchange and Microsoft OCS R2 and the user base balloons. However communication and collaboration is not limited to corporate boundaries and the out-of-the-box file transfer capabilities provided within Outlook, OCS and SharePoint do not provide a guaranteed secure delivery path to all users.

To work efficiently and share information securely across organizational boundaries requires an additional file transfer security layer to bridge the security gap in Microsoft’s communication and collaboration platform.

Punching holes in firewalls, managing separate server farms to serve the external user community, changing network topology, adding servers to the DMZ adds a tremendous amount of IT management and licensing cost to maintain this additional infrastructure.

Today we announced general availability of the Accellion secure file transfer plug-ins for the Microsoft Business Productivity Suite. The Accellion plug-ins enable Microsoft SharePoint, Outlook and OCS users to quickly and securely send information from within Outlook, the Office Communicator Client or from the SharePoint Document Library to both internal and external parties. Best of all the organization has complete tracking of all file transfers to ensure compliance and data security.

• Want to send and track a file from the Microsoft SharePoint library to an external collaborator?
• Want to send a 2G file without hampering the performance of the Exchange server?
• Want to send a file securely during chat within Microsoft OCS?

No problem, with the Accellion Microsoft Business Productivity secure file transfer plug-ins. Designed for fast, easy deployment, the Accellion secure file transfer plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and OCS allow organizations to maximize the utilization and performance of these solutions while closing the security gap.

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

Don’t Let Email Destroy Your Relationships

Monday, October 11th, 2010

You can’t live with them or without them. I am referring to emails. Only a few lucky souls get less than ten emails a day. But most corporate employees get tens and even hundreds of emails each and every day. A Plantronics study called “How We Work,” reveals that email usage by professionals has increased 78 percent over the past five years with half of those surveyed saying email causes workplace relationship problems such as communication anxiety and confusion. Nearly 4 out of 10 respondents said they received emails that made no sense whatsoever. 72 percent had to follow up on an unintelligible email with a phone call.

Emails with large file attachments are also relationship killers. Even the most spectacular presentation can lose its luster by the time it reaches its recipient, if it is delivered as a large file attachment. That “Oh wow” is supplanted by “Arrg…I was finally able to open your email and download the attachment. But everyone in the office is glaring at me for slowing down the email system.”

Relationships can be mended by simply offloading attachments from email servers and sending a secure link via Accellion. Encourage your company to utilize secure file transfer solutions. With the Accellion Secure File Transfer system, email servers are no longer clogged up and business productivity isn’t degraded.

Posted in Accellion, Email Attachments | No Comments »

I’ll stick to my Enterprise solution

Monday, September 27th, 2010

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.

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

A Little Privacy Please

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

TechCrunch is one of my favorite sites to get the latest tech gossip. Who wouldn’t want to know about Mark Zuckerberg’s personal life, Carol Bartz’s liberal use of the F-word, and of course breaking technology news?

Last week’s post by TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington caught my eye. Arrington emphatically states that Google employees found abusing user data should be criminally prosecuted. I couldn’t agree with him more. Google recently fired two employees for inappropriately accessing user data but hasn’t commented on whether employees will be charged with any crime.

With Google and other search engines having an un-Godly amount of user data, I wondered what life would be like if all of our data was secured. What if all our emails were encrypted and file attachments kept away from prying eyes?

For those trying to ensure that Yahoo/Bing and Google stay at arm’s length, might I suggest In-Private Browsing which prevents the browser from storing information on your browsing session.

As for protecting the integrity of email file attachments, Accellion offers a FIPS 140-2 certified solution that is secure enough for federal, state and local governments to quickly and easily send and receive files using the Accellion managed file transfer system. With Accellion, corporations and their employees can protect documents from prying eyes and meet compliance regulations.

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

Expect Storage Rationing to Begin Soon

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Check out these charts on the rise of cloud computing from GigaOm. It’s the last figure entitled “Projected Storage Shortage by 2020″ that really grabbed my attention. In 2009 30% of the digital content created could not be accommodated in the cloud, by 2020 that number is expected to rise to 60% shortage. Sounds like it is time to start issuing ration books for storage or to change our ways.

It’s surprising that the projected shortage of cloud storage hasn’t got more attention but perhaps it’s a topic akin to discussing the drought in California while it’s raining – not too many interested listeners. For many organizations moving to the cloud, it offers the opportunity to tap into unlimited computing power and storage – well maybe not quite unlimited.

Somehow I don’t think the rate of creation of digital data is going to slow (check out Data Tsunami – 5 Exabytes of Data Created Every 2 Days?) but we certainly could do a better job of managing the storage of data. Many of today’s IT systems are designed as if storage grew on trees. In some cases it’s the system that is wasteful and in some cases it’s the user who is wasteful.

In the world of email attachments we have wastage on both fronts, but if I had to pick sides, the users are probably the worst offenders. At least with email systems, IT administrators can put limits on the size of individual mailboxes and on the size of email attachments that can be attached. Unfortunately these constraints can make it impossible for a user to get their job done. Email attachment limits are the IT equivalent of flow control valves on showerheads and toilets. While they constrict the flow which is good, they also prevent people from getting done what they need to, which is bad. You have to shower longer to rinse the soap off, the kids now flush the toilet twice, and your users go off looking for IT workarounds for file transfer.

One of the most popular features of Accellion secure file transfer is the automatic file cleanup, which means that file storage is rarely an issue with Accellion. Files transferred via Accellion are available for a specified period of time, typically 14 to 30 days. After that it’s “Hasta la vista” and the file is automatically deleted.

So our Accellion tip for today is – if email storage has got to the point where you are considering ration books it might be time to consider a solution for those email attachments – it’s called Accellion.

Back to School – No File Left Behind

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

It’s back to school time. As I read through the stack of back to school forms, looking for the dotted lines for the parent signature, my eyes stopped abruptly at the sentence “flash drive strongly recommended”. Nooooooo – this is where it all begins. Innocent young minds being corrupted with the idea that transferring files on a flash drive is a good idea.

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.

Posted in Accellion, Email Attachments, FTP | No Comments »

Environmental Impact of Email Attachments – Storm in a Teacup?

Monday, August 16th, 2010

The Mother Jones article from last Monday entitled “Are Email Attachments Bad for the Environment?” is certainly getting a reaction. The article is still circulating the twitosphere, even one week later.

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.

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

Do These Files Make My Email Look Big?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Today’s blog posting was prompted by the fabulous headline in the WSJ this morning “Do These Jeans Make My Diaper Look Big?” In case you are wondering, the article is about the fashion trend of skinny jeans for toddlers – go figure.

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.