Did you know that as smartphone use increases in a particular industry, the number of data breaches rise as well? Enterprises want their employees to use mobile devices, but the data security concerns can be overwhelming. How do enterprise IT departments enable secure mobile productivity amongst their workers?
View The Effects of Mobile on the Enterprise to learn more.
The early days of mobile access to corporate e-mail is littered with now-defunct platforms, including Danger, HandSpring, Palm and others. It was Research in Motion (RIM) that launched the first wave of true enterprise mobility. With its well-designed Blackberry handset, robust operating system and highly secure network, RIM revolutionized the space, for better or worse, turning the mundane task of checking e-mail into a must-do activity at dinner, social gatherings and any other time. Some of you may remember this as the “CrackBerry” era.
Apple heralded the second wave of mobility with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad, and the Apple App Store. While the devices themselves were never intended to be corporate workhorses, people’s love affairs with “Designed by Apple in California” has fueled an entire software development industry, churning out apps to appeal to every user’s needs or desires. As of this month, Apple is approaching 50 billion app downloads, with a run rate approaching 2.5 billion per month – and accelerating.
While the iPad has spawned an entire me-too tablet industry, the second wave has also thrown down the gauntlet to IT, forcing organizations to radically alter what they consider to be “corporate” devices. People simply cannot get enough of their app-rich devices, are not willing to leave them at the company gates.
Initial efforts to squash the BYOD revolution have given way to acceptance that these devices offer too many benefits to be excluded from the corporate roster of computers. Plus, banning them only creates another shadow technology world, where workers copy content off the corporate networks, store it in cloud file shares, and sync it back to their iPads or Android devices.
Now we are entering the third wave of mobility, the era of mobile productivity. Beyond e-mail access, beyond viewing and sharing files on an iPad, organizations are looking to enrich existing business processes and boost productivity. The benefits of a mobile workforce have already been established, and the value of the 3.5+ mobile devices that most knowledge workers carry is beyond question.
But there is an increasing recognition that existing enterprise resources and infrastructure, including SharePoint repositories and other enterprise content management systems, also offer significant benefits to the organization – the equivalent of the solid concrete foundation underpinning a new and airy corporate office. The conversation has shifted away from the polarized, philosophical questions – “Should we allow personal mobile devices?” and “How can we block access to cloud file sharing services?” – to a more inclusive, action-oriented focus: “How do we use mobile devices securely to expand the boundaries around how, when, and where employees are productive?”
Is your organization ready for this next wave of mobility?
Today’s users expect PC-like functionality from their mobile devices, including the ability to print documents. According to an October 2011 report from research firm IDC, mobile printing is the fastest growing segment in the document solutions industry and is expected to grow from 68.3 million in 2010 to 1 billion in 2015.
As the use of mobile devices in the work place increases, many employees want to simply click “print” from their tablet or smartphone and print to their normal workplace printer. Unfortunately, this option is not available on most devices.
In many companies, IT has misjudged the need for mobile printing and is now realizing that employees need to print from these devices just as they would from a laptop or desktop. IT also needs to maintain strong authentication and role-based security features, to ensure that mobile printing doesn’t create new opportunities for data breaches to occur.
The benefits of deploying a mobile printing solution that offers robust enterprise security features and maximizes the mobile productivity of your workforce are worth exploring. Organizations that enable mobile printing can accelerate field and back office processes, save time, and most importantly improve mobile productivity.
Accellion’s mobile printing solution features embedded printing technology from Ricoh. View a use case for mobile printing here.
Rama Kolappan, Mobile Director with Accellion, recently addressed the topic of Enabling Secure and Mobile Cloud Collaboration at Secure Seattle 2013 . The 3 key messages to enterprises:
1) You are not alone; mobile productivity challenges face all types of organizations.
2) The BYOD trend can do more good than harm.
3) Sharing enterprise content securely in this era of the iPad is realistic and easier than you think.
Check out the full presentation below.
Ever wonder what type of toothbrush your dentist uses at home? Or how often your trusted mechanic gets the oil changed on his/her own car? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what products and practices the experts actually rely on behind the scenes? Well, thanks to a recent article in The Guardian, we gained a glimpse into how the mobile productivity editor of TIME Magazine – Harry McCracken – stays productive while out and about on the reporting scene.
Here’s some of what we learned:
• Harry’s tablet of choice? An iPad.
• A good keyboard is key: A keyboard can transform an iPad from a media consumption device into a legitimate productivity tool. Sure, some people do just fine with on-screen typing, but for Harry, he wanted a physical keyboard to be able to see more of his writing at one time. He’s tried out a lot of models and has found his favorites are from two companies – Zagg and Logitech.
• Desktop be gone: McCracken has traded in his desktop for a laptop at the office, although you’ll usually see him on an iPad, even when at his desk. He said that he traveled with his laptop for a while as a security blanket but then realized that the iPad could support his mobile computing needs just fine.
• Skeptics are everywhere: Despite being on the cutting-edge of mobile technology, Harry’s reliance on tablets has been met with raised eyebrows. “People get very defensive when someone is taking a different approach to computing then they do. My feeling is, there is no wrong way to use computers. If you’re happy and productive, all ways are equally good.”
Are you using a tablet for your day-to-day job? If so, check out the latest news on our Secure Mobile Productivity Suite, which allows employees to easily create, edit, and share files on a mobile device without exposing sensitive business information. It’s mobile productivity at its best.
Whether you are an organization with 50 employees or 50,000, finding a way to manage and secure employees’ mobile devices and access rights to corporate data is imperative. BYOD policies aren’t just for the big guys. If employees are bringing smartphones, tablets, or other devices into the office, then the chances are good that those same employees have plans to use (or are already using) those devices to access and send work-related files. It’s up to the organization to dictate when and how that happens.
We’re seeing a positive uptick among SMBs addressing the mobile device movement, with new research by iGR showing that 62 percent of IT managers at SMBs have an official BYOD policy in place. Yet, the same research found that 73 percent unofficially permit workers to use personal devices for work purposes.
It’s great news that so many smaller organizations have put a stake in the ground with a written BYOD policy. Hats off to you! It’s the 73 percent that are allowing employees to use devices without any official parameters that has us concerned.
Acknowledging that mobile access is a work must-have is an important first step. But, that needs to be followed with IT controls to ensure that files are being accessed only by authorized users, all mobile content is being shared securely, and that users are only turning to file sharing applications that have been thoroughly vetted by the organization.
So whether your organization has less than 50 or more than 50,000 employees, consider secure mobile file sharing an essential element of your mobile strategy, and make BYOD an official order of business.
Legal Regulator’s Board Meetings Go Mobile
New Zealand Law Society plays a very important role: acting as the regulatory authority for all lawyers across the country. To make that happen, ongoing committee, planning, and board communications and meetings are a regular part of operations. Anything that can be done to make the meetings more efficient translates to less time around the meeting table and faster decision-making.
With some meeting documentation exceeding 2,000 pages, printing hard copies for meeting participants just didn’t make sense – from either a cost or environmental perspective. The Society decided to make a change, equipping board members with iPads so that any necessary files could be shared, edited, and accessed electronically. How? Via Accellion.
“Our board meetings have taken on a whole new level of efficiency,” said Malcolm Gunn, IT Manager with New Zealand Law Society. “We upload documents to Accellion and board members download the files on their iPad using the Accellion Mobile App. They annotate the PDFs prior to meetings and then access those notes during the discussion.”
The success of using Accellion for board meetings has paved the way for use among other Society committees, legal research teams, and librarians.
Click here to read New Zealand Law Society’s full story.
Employees are more productive than ever. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, worker productivity grew 80 percent from 1973 to 2011, and has risen 25 percent in the past 10 years alone.
This uptick is certainly tied to the fact that many employees are able to do their jobs from anywhere. Thanks to flexible work environments and mobile devices, employees are simply better equipped than ever to get their jobs done better – provided they have access to the content they need while out of the office.
To help store and manage access to enterprise documents, 78 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft® SharePoint. And within organizations that have deployed SharePoint, 62 percent of information workers are turning to the application daily to find the files they need. But what happens when those same workers walk out of the office doors and try to access the files via smartphones and other mobile devices? The productivity ends there since for most organizations access to SharePoint stops at the corporate firewall. Why is this? Because external file sharing of files stored in SharePoint is not well supported either for employees wanting access on mobile devices or for organizations wanting to share with external parties.
Lack of external file sharing of SharePoint files leads to increased data risk and reduced productivity. Without supporting mobile access to SharePoint employees seek unsecure workarounds such as downloading files out of SharePoint and sharing via free cloud based services. The same for sharing SharePoint files with external parties. Employees will find a way
But, this doesn’t have to be the case. If you’re ready to mobilize SharePoint or another enterprise content management (ECM) solution, check out the five key requirements to help you maximize security, IT management, and productive employee communications.
With the right SharePoint-enabled secure mobility solution, users can easily and securely get a hold of the information they need and instantly share with others – without a VPN. And, in turn, your organization is able to keep pace with the upward productivity trend – a win-win.
Changes are afoot in the health care industry. New HIPAA regulations were unveiled last month to ramp up patients’ privacy and access rights. One of the important new patient access rights is that individuals can now request a copy of their electronic medical records to be sent, well, electronically. I don’t know about you, but long ago my doctors traded in clipboards and pens for computers, iPads and mobile devices, capturing my personal health information via a simple, touchscreen interface. So, it only makes sense that as individuals we should be able to access our electronically stored personal medical data and play a more active role in how our medical-related information is communicated and managed.
The new HIPAA regulations also introduce increased penalties for HIPAA noncompliance. With data breaches continuing to make headlines, the penalty for negligence in protecting health information (PHI) now carries a maximum penalty of $1.5 million per violation.
From an individual’s perspective the new HIPAA regulations are excellent news. Now it is mandated that we can easily get a copy of our own medical records, while at the same time organizations are being held increasingly accountable for protecting this sensitive information.
The new HIPAA rules also mean that health care organizations must have a secure file sharing and transfer method in place for sharing medical records with patients or risk paying the price in terms of hefty HIPAA fines .
Many of the leading healthcare organizations already use Accellion secure file sharing to ensure HIPAA compliance. Read more about how one of the top U.S. hospitals turned to Accellion to boost data security, share vast amounts of information, and support ongoing HIPAA compliance.
If your organization hasn’t had a secure file sharing health checkup in the past year, please contact us for a confidential review of your current systems. We are here to help.
According to analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group, the enterprise cloud based file sharing revolution is being driven not by IT, but by end users – individuals who need to access and share data across laptops, smart phones and tablets whenever the need may arise. And, it’s these individuals who often subscribe to consumer-based file sharing solutions on their own and then bring those tools into the enterprise to support business use – creating a data security nightmare for IT.
This situation has IT playing catch up, yet many organizations are hesitant to embrace cloud services. Why? ESG found that 43 percent of organizations are worried about data security and privacy concerns and 32 percent about giving up too much control. Ironically, without a proper file sharing solution in place, users are calling the shots, creating the same security risks and a lack of control that’s been holding them back from the cloud in the first place.
In a new white paper, Evaluating Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration Solutions, ESG advised organizations to find a single, secure file sharing and collaboration solution that they can confidently endorse and provides a checklist of what to ask during the due diligence process, including:
To help you make a smart investment that’s right for your company, download the complete recommended checklist today.
P.S. Accellion answers “yes” to all of the questions above.
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