Archive for the ‘Product’ Category

Accellion at Microsoft Tech Ed North America

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Last week, Accellion exhibited at Microsoft Tech Ed North America for the first time. It was a great event and met all of our expectations!

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!

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

Big File Transfer Myth – BUSTED

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Mythbusters has to be one of my favorite programs. Since 2003 they have tested more than 700 myths related to technology, science, animals, humans, food – you name it they’ve tried it.  And if they haven’t tried it you can submit a myth for them to test.  Last week’s episode investigated the validity of the Giant Water Slide Jump that has been a recent YouTube hit.  Awesome fun!

Stephanie Jordan of Messaging News did her own myth busting this week in her recent article entitled Managed File Transfer Myth:-MFT is just for Big Corporations with Big Files.

Stephanie tackled the Big File Transfer myth head-on by exploring the relationship between the size of a file, the size of an organization and the associated security risk.  Its an important topic to cover and thanks Stephanie for raising awareness that no matter the size of the file or the size of the organization you can get yourself in a heap of trouble if you are not securing the transfer of intellectual property and confidential information.

Just like the Giant Water Slide Jump, the Myth that Managed File transfer is just for Big Corporations with Big files is officially  - BUSTED.

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

Accellion Cloud beats the Volcanic Ash Cloud

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Yet again, ash clouds from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland are seriously affecting airline traffic, with Heathrow airport closed again this morning. Over the past few weeks millions of passengers - and important documents – have been stranded across Europe and the world.

Clyde & Co. LLP, a leading international law firm based in London, recently purchased the Accellion secure file transfer solution to ensure safe delivery of sensitive documents and avoid paying courier charges.  They had originally chosen an Accellion hardware appliances but then fate intervened: Clyde & Co. ran into problems thanks to the flight disruptions caused by the Icelandic volcano: it wasn’t only passengers that were struggling to get home, the Accellion appliance could not be delivered by FedEx either.

But it got worse than that. The continuing disruption also meant that courier companies couldn’t deliver legal documents to Clyde & Co’s clients either – a major disruption of service for a legal company.

Clyde & Co. IT manager, Phil Newnham, called Accellion for urgent help and while we couldn’t charter a plane, we set up a hosted Accellion cloud appliance and within minutes Clyde & Co. was able to send confidential legal documents. Clyde & Co. files were flying again.

Even volcanoes can’t stop Accellion.

Posted in Accellion, Cloud, Product, UK | No Comments »

eWeek Review of Accellion Managed File Transfer

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

eWeek Magazine recently conducted a product review of Accellion secure file transfer. The review, appearing May 5, 2010, describes Accellion’s managed file transfer solution as highly scalable, appropriately priced and designed for the performance, security and compliance needs of the enterprise.  Wow, when I read that, I felt like taking the rest of the day off.  Yep, that just about sums up what Accellion secure file transfer is all about.

According to the reviewer, Wayne Rash, “The primary differentiator between Accellion’s product and similar products such as YouSendIt is that Accellion is designed specifically for the performance, security and compliance needs of the enterprise.  It’s not an outgrowth of a consumer product.”  The review continues by stating, “Beneath the surface of the Accellion product lies support for the largest of enterprises, with infrastructure that can be based in your data center or in the cloud.  The key feature of Accellion’s solution is that it’s equally useful for enterprises of any size.”

Wayne tested Accellion in the cloud.  To view his eWeek review of the Accellion Secure File Transfer Solution in its entirety visit Accellion Delivers Enterprise Class MFT.

Thanks Wayne you made our day.

Posted in Accellion, Product | No Comments »

Digital Copiers and Scanners – Digital Time Bombs

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian wins the Accellion Top Sleuth award this week, with his story on Digital Photocopiers Loaded with Secrets. Holey Moley, what were people thinking when they discarded their digital photocopiers?  Digital copiers contain hard drives that store images of documents, scanned, copied and emailed from the machine.  Extracting this info from discarded photocopiers is not much of a challenge, especially when the disk is not encrypted. Apparently one photocopier even had a sensitive document still under the copier glass. While major manufacturers of digital copiers and scanners offer security and encryption packages, there is mounting evidence that organizations aren’t generally aware of the security risks inherent with these devices.

So why the interest by Accellion in digital copiers and scanners?  We’ve had our eye on these little beasties for quite some time as potential sources of data leakage. Today’s digital copiers and scanners provide the ability to scan a document and then email the resulting digital file as an email attachment. Without security controls, digital copiers and scanners pose a serious threat to protection of intellectual property and non-compliance with regulations such as HIPAA. In addition, scanned documents create huge email attachments that wreak havoc on email performance.  A couple of years ago we introduced the SMTP Satellite to plug this security hole and improve email performance.

With the Accellion SMTP Satellite organizations can secure and track the transfer of scanned documents and offload delivery from email.  And we’ve written earlier on our view that disk and data encryption is always a good idea.

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

Accellion Automation and the Black Eyed Peas

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Last weekend I attended the sold out Black Eyed Peas concert with my 8 year-old daughter – it was her first concert experience. We had an awesome time!

After paying a small fortune for the tickets it got me thinking about the business of ticket sales and the Accellion customer who uses Accellion Automation to collect ticket sale data from their external vendors. Before Accellion, their IT department had to setup an FTP file share that was used by all of their external clients. They would each login at the end of the day and upload their ticket sales database. There were endless problems with forgotten passwords, transfers that didn’t complete, and confusion about which files to put where.

With Accellion installed the process goes much more smoothly. Accellion Envelopes were created for each vendor, pre-addressed to the correct automation process. The vendors were sent invitations to use Accellion. They login to the Accellion Web Client interface, choose the correct pre-addressed envelope for their transaction, load the file, and send. If they accidentally shutdown in the middle of the transaction, the next time they login, the transaction is resumed from where it left off. With the size of files they were sending, this was a big deal for them. They also didn’t have to learn a new FTP client, could manage their own passwords, and know that the files would make it safely and securely to their destination. And our customer was happy that they had the Accellion Automation Agent setup to automatically download files coming in and place them in the appropriate folder to be put into their business process.

Now I need to get back online and figure out the next great concert coming to town…

Mary Nicknish, Accellion Product Manager

Posted in Accellion, Automation, FTP, Product | No Comments »

Yes! I’d Like a Receipt

Monday, February 8th, 2010

About 8 months ago I joined Accellion as a Product Manager. Originally I’m from Iowa but I’ve spent most of my career in Silicon Valley in product development.

Most recently I came from a small startup in a similar space.  I was part of a team developing a private email solution where email addresses, subject, and content were encrypted and sent through a private tunnel. Coming to Accellion was an easy transition for me… the Accellion solution already did all the things my previous company dreamed about!

It’s fun developing an enterprise solution that solves a problem that most organizations live with on a daily basis – bogged down email servers and files that can’t get through. I’m continually amazed at the number of organizations that haven’t solved these problems. Accellion is such an elegant solution it’s great to hear the sighs of relief from customers – that their file transfer problems are solved and that IT is no longer being hounded by end users struggling with FTP.

I’m going to be writing regularly about Accellion product features and providing useful tips and I welcome your feedback.

Mary Nicknish

Tip for Today – if you’ve ever used FedEX and asked for a signature, you probably already appreciate that it is good to know when a package was received and by whom.  Did you know you can get the same type of receipt with every file transfer you send via Accellion? – it looks like this<

***********************************************************
Return Receipt

Your attachment: Healthcare_Case_Study.doc
Was downloaded at: 14 December 2009 15:00:10
By recipient: mary.nicknish@accellion.com
File size is: 291.00 KB

**********************************************************

Posted in Accellion, Product | No Comments »