Posts Tagged ‘Collaboration’

Accellion in Action: New Zealand Law Society

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

 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.

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Posted in Accellion, Mobile | No Comments »

An Accellion Thanksgiving!

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

An article in CIO reminds us all of the importance of information sharing and collaboration in successful organizations. The need to share and collaborate is not new at all. We can go back to 1620 when a boat filled with more than one hundred people sailed across the Atlantic to settle the New World.

The first winter for the Pilgrims was very difficult because they had arrived too late to plant crops. However, next spring Native Americans shared valuable information about native crops. In the autumn of 1621, the colonists harvested plentiful crops of corn, barley, beans and pumpkins. The colonists had much to be thankful for, and a feast was planned. The local Indians brought deer to roast with turkey and other wild game. This spirit of sharing and collaboration between the Pilgrims and Indians made it possible for the early settlers to prosper in the New World.

Today many businesses thrive on the same “need to share” mindset that the Indians and Native Americans demonstrated back in 1620.

In this season of sharing, Accellion has a few tips for sharing corporate information securely with colleagues, customers, partners, and vendors in order to create more productive enterprises.

1. Choose a secure file sharing solution that is simple enough for employees to use, but secure enough for IT. When secure file sharing is easy, employees make it as part of their daily routine and organizations encourage it.

2. Find a mobile file sharing solution that integrates with your existing enterprise IT infrastructure, including SharePoint, iManage, active directory, archiving systems, mobile device management and data loss prevention (DLP) systems. When secure file sharing works along-side existing applications, no one loses out. Investments are not wasted.

3.Implement a solution that enables secure file sharing across corporate boundaries. When both internal and external users securely collaborate on projects, information shared among partners, vendors, and suppliers is protected.

4. Select a solution that provides native applications for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices to securely view, share and edit content on-the-go. When mobile file sharing is ubiquitous, there is no excuse for using unsecure workarounds.

5. Select a solution that provides the audit trails and reporting required to demonstrate compliance with industry and government regulations such as PCI, SOX, and HIPAA. When organizations need to not only protect sensitive data, but also demonstrate compliance, sophisticated reporting is a must have feature.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Accellion Team!

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

Losing ZZZ’s Over BYOC

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

The high-tech world has no shortage of acronyms. DLP, NAC, TCP, WAN, Wifi– the list goes on and on, making it tough to keep track of the latest buzzwords. Perhaps one of the most widely used acronyms currently is BYOD- the much talked about trend of employees bringing their own devices into the enterprise and the security challenges created as a result.

Well, get ready, because there’s a new acronym that’s entered the fold: BYOC. Bring Your Own Collaboration.

While research conducted this summer by Varonis Systems found that 80 percent of companies do not allow their employees to use collaboration services due to data leakage concerns. Guess what? Your employees are using these solutions anyway.

A survey by Computacenter of IT decision makers found that 84 percent of employees secretly access consumer cloud collaboration solutions in the workplace because their own organizations don’t provide effective alternatives. Translation: if you don’t provide a corporate file sharing and collaboration option, employees will make a point to find one on their own, creating a BYOC ripple effect before you know it.

This BYOC movement is yet another reason for IT administrators to lose sleep. Point in case, Dan Raywood with SC Magazine recently attended a CISO roundtable and the question, “what keeps you awake at night” was answered by a panelist with a single word: “Dropbox.” So, there you have it.

Employees clearly need a way to collaborate and share information. So, you can either provide them with a solution that’s secure and built for enterprise use, or they’ll bring one of their own, which probably will not be secure or appropriate for enterprise user. What’s it going to be?

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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, Data Breach | No Comments »

Customer Spotlight: International Law Firm Makes the Case for Accellion Mobile Apps

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

For law firms, being able to communicate with clients anywhere, anytime is a top priority – and a key ingredient to retaining existing accounts. No one understands that better than Allens Linklaters (Allens) – a firm that was on a mission to find a more secure and reliable way for its 800 attorneys to collaborate and exchange critical files with clients.

Allens’ standard methods of sending files via CD or FTP posed serious limitations – opening up the firm to security risks and providing limited visibility into whether files were received, opened, or reviewed. Plus, with so many of its employees and clients using Androids and iPads for daily work interactions, the firm wanted to allow users to access documents from any location – and any device.

The firm considered moving to a consumer-grade solution such as Dropbox, but wanted a more secure, reliable product that could truly support the mobility of its clientbase. After testing eight solutions, Allens found that Accellion Secure Collaboration was the only vendor that offered extensive functionality, mobile support, top-notch security, and could be hosted on-site.

“Where our data is transported and ultimately resides is very important to us and our clients. Now our attorneys can collaborate on upcoming cases, maintain up-to-date visibility into how their documents are being accessed, and rest assured that confidential information stays out of the wrong hands,” said Shawn Schmidt, Infrastructure Manager with Allens.

Allens’ IT department is also putting Accellion to the test, using the solution to upload support logs and troubleshooting data,  providing a one-stop shop for IT help desk information. Plus, with Accellion Mobile Apps, clients, partners, and attorneys now have immediate, unlimited access to the information they need – whether at the airport, en route to a meeting, or unwinding at home.

“Being able to safely browse, edit, share, and send corporate and auditable information from anywhere is a big priority for our clients and we’ve made it happen with Accellion,” said Schmidt.

Click here to read the full case study.

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What I Don’t Love About SharePoint

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Accellion

A recent article in Fierce Content Management entitled “Survey finds many users blow by SharePoint security” reveals how cavalier some Microsoft SharePoint users are about maintaining security within the widely used Enterprise collaboration and content management solution.  According to the SharePoint security survey conducted by Cryptzone, an IT threat mitigation company, 92% of respondents said they knew that taking content out of SharePoint created a security risk; still 30% were willing to take that risk for the sake of convenience.  Even more eye-opening was that 43% took sensitive content out of SharePoint to work at home and 55% said they did that to give material to someone without access to SharePoint.

There’s a clear need to be able to share files externally from SharePoint that is not currently being addressed in many organizations.

To effectively collaborate today, users need to easily share content securely within their organization and with external partners across the firewall. But in order to securely share data with outside parties, organizations need to create a secure file sharing system within their SharePoint environment.  Unfortunately, it is not easy or inexpensive to build an external-facing SharePoint server farm.

In order to open up content in SharePoint to external users, IT needs to provision a license and also set up external facing SharePoint servers on the DMZ.  This is an expensive proposition. So organizations usually bypass setting up external SharePoint servers.  This often leads employees to create work-arounds rather than taking the time to put in IT requests.  However, this is a data breach waiting to happen.  Once a document leaves SharePoint “illegally” the ability to track and manage the file is compromised.  This is particularly important in industries subject to HIPAA and other regulatory compliance.

There is a solution to this problem for organizations who want to make the most of their SharePoint investment.  Accellion offers a plug-in for SharePoint that enables users to quickly, easily, and securely share any size file from within the SharePoint Document Library to both internal and external recipients.  The plug-in not only makes it easy to share files across the corporate firewall but also provides easy-to-use file tracking and reporting required to meet industry and government regulations such as HIPAA, SOX and GLBA.

So if your organization has made an investment in SharePoint but you haven’t yet implemented external sharing of SharePoint documents for your users please give us a call.   As the Cryptzone survey illustrated if a solution isn’t provided for external file sharing from SharePoint then users will come up with their own solution and security isn’t typically top of their list of requirements.

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Posted in Accellion, Collaboration, SharePoint | 3 Comments »

The Mobile Offensive! BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

Mobile employees have been worrying IT managers for years. It all started with pagers, PDAs, and the first cellular phones. Now iPads, smartphones, and a slew of other Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices are on track to outnumber desktop computers. The local area network (LAN) that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, computer lab, or office building is fading fast. Most enterprise networks are moving to wireless as the primary way to connect. In the same way that video killed the radio star; Wi-Fi enabled devices and the BYOD trend are killing the LAN. Mobile devices that were restricted by IT managers are now considered indispensible for everyday operations.

Do you think the BYOD trend is not real, or a fad? According to ZDNET, about 75% of enterprises now have a “bring your own device” policy in place. That’s nearly three-quarters of companies surveyed—so yeah BYOD is for real.

A quarter of organizations give employees a whitelist of allowed devices, while almost half let employees bring in and use any device.

  

Bring Your Own Device? It’s real. Nearly three-quarters of companies allow employee-owned smartphones and/or tablets to be used at work, according to Aberdeen data (mix of late 2010 and 2011 surveys). A quarter give employees a whitelist of allowed devices, while almost half let employees bring in and use any device.

Here are four trends that motivate companies to try BYOD:

Employee gratification: device lust is no longer just for tech geeks. Employees love BYOD at work. Allowing BYOD can be a real motivational tool. Employees, particularly younger, on-the-move employees, see the brand of a laptop or smartphone as a lifestyle choice and an important part of who they are. Of course Apple is at the epicenter of this movement.

Tech developments: the days of compatibility problems and sharing issues from Mac to Windows are ancient history. A few anti-trust lawsuits got everyone’s attention and a solution was found. The compatibility problems were one thing. In the past the size, weight, and cost of computers made mobile computing an oxymoron.  In 1983 BYOD would not have been possible. This 29 pound BASF 7000 computer would have been nearly impossible to bring to work.  Today’s shinny mobile devices are easy to transport and don’t weight a ton.

Telecommuting and mobile workers:  some of the same technical developments listed above enable more and more workers to work from home, remotely, or on-the-go. Other technical developments like secure file transfer and secure collaboration allow external employees to be productive and secure.

Cost: back in the good old days a computer like the BASF 7000 would have hurt your back and strained your IT budget. At $2800 ($6000 at today’s dollar) this beast of burden cost an arm and a leg. Just think about that next time your fingers are deftly gliding across your light weight tablet or smartphone. With the cost of laptops and tablets around $500 the cost factor, like the BASF 7000, is a thing of the past.

At Accellion we see the BYOD trend as a shift in the increasing demand for mobile access to file sharing. If you haven’t already tried out the Accellion mobile apps here is the link.

 

Aberdeen 2011 Wireless Expense Management: Control International Roaming and the BYOD Revolution. The multimedia content can be viewed at: http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/7240/RA-wireless-expense-management.aspx

Lai, E. (2011). 75% of enterprises have ‘bring your own device’ policies. what that means. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/75-of-enterprises-have-bring-your-own-device-policies-what-that-means-charts/1025

The Buggles. (1979). Video killed the radio star [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Accellion, Automation, Collaboration, Data Security, Mobile | 1 Comment »