Posts Tagged ‘IT’

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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Posted in Accellion, Data Security | No Comments »

Buried Alive by Consumer Applications in the Workspace

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

An article in GigaOM citing new research by Unisys on the consumerization of IT recently piqued my interest.   According to the research, IT pros underestimate the use of consumer technologies in the workplace by a whopping 50%.  In fact, IT decision-makers gave themselves a rating of only 2.9 for overall support of employee owned mobile devices, social applications and integration of social apps with enterprise applications.  According to Isabella Mark, director of Global Solution Management at Unisys, IT is falling behind in addressing and benefiting from consumer technologies due to the sheer volume they now have to deal with.  Each new technology that employees bring into the workplace is another technology that IT needs to figure out how to use, manage, or perhaps even ban.

Accellion Infographic - Consumerization - Personal Device Use

For many, Dropbox represents the poster child for the consumerization of IT.  Free and easy to get your hands on, the Dropbox consumer file sharing app has spread like wild fire through organizations.  And now IT and security teams are grappling with how to deal with the security risks of unmanaged, untracked file sharing of enterprise data via personal Dropbox accounts.  Learn more about the privacy concerns of consumer file sharing apps that stem from the consumerization of IT in our latest whitepaper, “Beyond Dropbox: Requirements of Enterprise Class Secure File Sharing.”  While Accellion’s solutions are enterprise-class, they are created for ease-of-use, and also provide the security and management that IT requires.

Stillman, J. (2011, November 18). Consumerization study: It pros swamped, behind on mobile. Retrieved from http://gigaom.com/collaboration/consumerization-study-it-pros-swamped-behind-on-mobile/

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Posted in Accellion, Cloud, Data Security, Mobile | No Comments »

Data breaches put the scare back in Halloween!

Monday, October 31st, 2011

For most people outside the IT profession, the scariest thing they deal with on Halloween is a spooky costume or the newest episode of AMC’s ghastly drama “The Walking Dead.” For IT professionals, a data breach is far worse. With the frequency and cost of data breaches on the rise, it’s easy to see why the topic worries IT professionals. In its fifth annual TITLE survey the Ponemon Institute showed a significant spike in legal defense spending to address fears of successful class actions resulting from customer, consumer or employee data loss. In fact, the total cost per data breach incident now exceeds six million dollars.

If that’s not enough to chill IT and security professionals, another report commissioned by Websense surveyed 100 IT managers around the world about the latest threats to corporate security. The IT managers surveyed went on to say that data loss incidents put their jobs on the line, and that managing the stress of a company data breach is more taxing than divorce, managing personal debt, or a minor car accident.

There were 561 data breaches in 2010 and 589 data breaches to date this year. To avoid the stress of a data breach, IT professionals are employing robust security strategies to ease their worries.

We do our part to help Accellion’s customers and their business users protect data while sharing files with external and internal users.

As for the haunts of Halloween… there is nothing that can help the chills and thrills.

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Posted in Accellion, Data Breach, Data Security | 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.

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