Archive for the ‘Government’ Category

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 »

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.

MobileIronand 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.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Breach, Data Security, Government, Healthcare, Mobile, Product, Virtualization | No Comments »

EOL for Space Shuttle – 30 Year Product Life Better Than Most Cars?

Friday, July 8th, 2011

Atlantis on October 3, 1985 Photo Credit: NASA/KSC

This week, after 30 years of service, the Atlantis Space Shuttle is scheduled to make its final flight before retirement.  30 years ago we had no iPad or iPhone, we didn’t even have the Internet.  MS-DOS was just released by Microsoft, the hottest computer was the Sinclair ZX80 retailing at $199.95 and the “Best Selling Car in the America” was the Ford Escort.  With this technological perspective the Space Shuttle design is a mind blowing achievement.

It’s become easy over the years to take for granted the almost routine take off and landings of the Space Shuttle.  Yet a 30 year product lifetime, for any product, is impressive.  Compare the Space Shuttle’s 30 years of service to the ten years expected lifetime of a car and three years for a mobile phone.  Admittedly, the Space Shuttle didn’t get daily use, but still most technologies don’t have a 30 year product life.  Most people would consider themselves lucky to get two years of service out of laptop.

At Accellion, we’re proud that our file sharing solution has been in service for more than five years at customers such as P&G, Ogilvy & Mather, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, L’Oreal, and Hilton Hotels to name just a few.  Along the way we have enhanced Accellion file sharing, to support new technologies such as virtualization, cloud, and mobile apps.  And, yes, our customer base has grown significantly over the years, including the addition of NASA several years ago. While product life is definitely influenced by technological advancement, customer satisfaction is perhaps the bigger contributing factor.  At Accellion, our extremely high customer renewal rate (>98%) represents not only a long product life but, more importantly, that our customers are our old friends.

Congratulations and best wishes to NASA for the final Space Shuttle launch.

Posted in Accellion, Government | 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 »

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 »