Posts Tagged ‘CIO’

Who Controls the Keys to Your (Data) Kingdom?

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

True or false? When you share your information with a public cloud service, you give up “ownership” rights to that data? Well, as some Twitter users can tell you, when an official legal request is involved, that statement is definitely true.

During the first half of this year alone, Twitter received 679 legal requests for user information – and ending up releasing the data 75 percent of the time. Begging the question: when you partner with a public cloud provider, is the information you make “public” rightfully yours?

But, even more importantly, to all IT executives out there, do you know where all of your data resides? It seems the majority aren’t quite sure. According to 2012 survey by Varonis, 67 percent of IT executives do not know where there data is and 74 percent don’t have a process for tracking which files have been placed on a third-party cloud storage server. So, if your cloud provider were to get compromised, you wouldn’t know which documents were at risk – a scary predicament, and a tough one to explain to the boss.

Most of our customers tell us that their data is the lifeblood of their businesses, so why hand over control of that information to anyone else? What many organizations are realizing is that when enterprise documents are stored or shared via a public cloud vendor, the vendor owns the keys to the data – the encryption keys, that is.

This is a showstopper, because it means IT surrenders all control over protection of their corporate jewels. He who owns the keys controls how information is accessed, by whom, and from where. If the keys were to be compromised (a real possibility given recent breaches of public cloud vendors as well as security vendors), your private data could become public in the blink of an eye.

I’d imagine you’d like to keep much of your private corporate data exactly that: private. So, make it a priority to know where your data is, how it could be used and the associated risks.

It’s your business, or kingdom, if you will. Insist on owning and protecting its keys.

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Had to Pause Angry Birds to Forward a File to my Boss

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Walk around any organization today and you will see people using the newest and coolest PCs, smartphones, and tablets. It’s not just the normal suspects that love the IT gadgets. It’s everyone from the CEO to the summer intern. Even my mom got an iPad and is getting in on the action.  It’s so easy to download emails and send photos to relatives. She takes it with her everywhere—even work. Everyone loves these devices at home and work because they’re easy to use. I suspect employees will be taking their devices on upcoming holiday vacations.

The problem that IT managers have is identifying the line between personal and business computer use. We know it has been blurring for years, but today it’s practically gone. The availability and variety of powerful mobile devices, along with the simplicity of adding apps, and cloud services has increased the distortion between personal and business use more than we ever imagined.

A new study sponsored by Unisys found that 40.7% of the devices used by workers to access business applications are ones they own themselves, including home PCs, smartphones, and tablets such as the iPad. Nearly 10% reported using their personal tablet for work—a device that did not even exist just 15 months ago.

Consumerization of IT Study

With this in mind, most IT managers and CIOs are well aware that we’ve turned a page and there is no going back.  The real question is, how can organizations cope in a world where the line between a personal and business computer is “cloudy” at best? The answer is identifying security issues and managing enterprise data.

Accellion provides the kind of enterprise solutions that offer the control and flexibility that IT needs, while keeping users happy with easy-to-use file sharing and collaboration applications that can be accessed anytime, from anywhere. And if you have employees like my Mom, who bring their iPad to work, you’ll be glad you invested in securing your sensitive enterprise data.

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Content for this post is excerpted directly from the IDC iView 2011 Consumerization of IT Study: Closing the ―Consumerization Gap, July 2011, sponsored by Unisys. The multimedia content can be viewed at http://www.unisys.com/iview.

 

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