The widespread adoption of Microsoft SharePoint, including by the majority of Fortune 500 organizations, has made it a must-have tool for many information and knowledge workers. However with the increasing use of mobile devices in the workplace, employees now expect important applications, like SharePoint, to travel with them. How does IT make that happen, while also making sure that security doesn’t take a hit?
View The Case for Mobilizing SharePoint infographic to learn more.
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.
Cloud-based file sharing and collaboration solutions are ripe for the picking, but what’s right for one organization might not be right for another. Accellion presented the pros and cons of various cloud computing choices at the InfoSec World 2013 Conference & Expo last month. To learn more about the top cloud considerations for file sharing and collaboration and to find out where you stand on the privacy and public cloud debate, check out this presentation entitled ”Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
It happens every day: individuals on the go turn to free cloud file sharing services to quickly share and access files on mobile devices. The use of these free cloud services including Dropbox and Box is most often not approved by the organization. We’ve heard first-hand the anxiety this causes IT with data security and compliance concerns with users sending out confidential information on a whim, whenever and wherever they please.
Now there is more reason for concern with the publishing of recent research from the University of Glasgow. In the recent report George Grispos of University of Glasgow found that his team could fully recover files that were sent via Dropbox, Box, and SugarSync – even those deleted from the file sharing services. The researchers uploaded a combination of files (Word documents, PDFs, and images); synced with their test devices (an HTC Android smartphone and an iPhone); viewed, saved, and deleted the files; and then made attempts to recover each.
In what InfoWorld calls a “data security perfect storm,” the testers were largely successful, with forensic toolkits recovering numerous deleted files on the Android phone, including 15 files from Box, 11 from SugarSync, and nine from DropBox.
The article reminds readers that these results provide “an excellent example as to why companies need to approach BYOD and cloud adoption with care.” And certainly goes to show that not all cloud solutions were created equal. Accellion provides private cloud file sharing solutions for enterprise use that ensure all enterprise information remains under the management and control of the organization and is not handed over to a third party. Enterprise-level security that extends to all files types, all mobile devices, and all users, is attainable and is a must for today’s organizations on the go. The team at Accellion is here to help.
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.
Dropbox, Box, YouSendIt, Google Drive, Evernote, Skype, Google Hangouts. These are just some of the apps that Delyn Simon – a 42-year old executive – rattled off to Quentin Hardy at The New York Times when asked what services she uses on her iPhone.
Forget the malicious cybercriminals, for most IT Administrators, it’s your own employees who are cause for the greatest concern. Downloading dozens of apps aimed to make daily work tasks more automated and convenient has become so commonplace that individuals often don’t think twice about hitting “install” on their smartphones and then using those unapproved apps to access and share company information.
And, the number of different apps within just one organization can be quite startling. In Hardy’s recent article, “Where Apps Meet Work, Secret Data is at Risk”, he shares that the streaming video service, Netflix, discovered employees using 496 different smartphone apps, primarily for data storage, sharing, and collaboration. And, Cisco Systems found several hundred apps touching its own network via employees’ usage.
The risks of accessing these apps for both personal and business interactions become very real when sensitive data is compromised. That’s exactly what happened last week when Evernote, an online note-taking service, experienced a breach, with customer names, emails and encrypted passwords possibly stolen, driving the company to reset passwords for 50 million users.
So, is there any way for organizations to prevent employees from using their own consumer mobile apps? Yes! But, first you must eliminate the need for employees to turn to outside data storage, sharing, and collaboration apps in the first place. That means providing a mandatory alternative – a solution that allows users to easily send, share, and access files and that allows you, the IT administrator, to know what’s being shared, where data is stored, and that corporate data is safe.
Empowering employees with a secure mobile application is the first step to keeping your corporate data safe in today’s mobile world. And it just so happens Accellion can help you with that.
With state-of-the-art engineering products and services for the building components industry at the heart of its business, MiTek Industries, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., regularly shares product enhancements, patches, and customer support materials with partners, employees, and customers. While the organization had provided employees with access via FTP, users were increasingly turning to Dropbox and other unapproved workarounds to support collaboration needs such as reviewing and editing files.
MiTek needed a secure alternative fast, but wasn’t willing to hand over control to just anyone – particularly those in the public cloud arena.
“With public cloud providers, there are so many unknowns when it comes to security: Where exactly are your files? How do you get files back if you change providers? How do you know where your employees are sending files? We weren’t willing to give up rights to data that was sensitive, proprietary, and rightfully ours,” said Justin Daniels, Web Services/Software Engineering and IT Support Manager with MiTek.
MiTek set out to find a secure and controlled collaboration solution to replace FTP and Dropbox. They came up with a list of key business requirements and reached out to current customers for vendor recommendations.
While you can probably guess which solution they picked, read the details on what led MiTek to Accellion and how we’re supporting the organization’s fast-paced business, including its remote sales and software reps.
Click here for the full story.
Recently Dropbox and Microsoft have publicly promoted new features for their free consumer file sharing solutions that could result in security risks for companies if used incorrectly or by those with malicious intent. Microsoft announced today a change to their SkyDrive collaboration feature. File sharing in SkyDrive is now defaulted to not require authentication.
Dropbox announced their open Sync APIs making it even easier for a 3rd party to register and download the Dropbox SDK and use it to embed Dropbox into applications. Given the already widespread usage of DropBox by not only consumers but also business users, this ease of integration only deepens the risk that enterprise content can leak into the unknown. The simplicity to leverage Dropbox APIs also allows the opportunity for people with malicious intent to develop free apps that users perceive as useful but in turn allows access to dropbox accounts. Behind the scenes the app could be copying content.
And lack of authentication as a default setting can lead to similar negative consequences. For example, without care and attention and end user could inadvertently share documents with unintended recipients.
Accellion advises the following to any organisation looking for a file sharing solution that will protect enterprise information.
1. Ensure you can set authentication to be turned on by default. Sending without this should be the exception not the rule.
2. Restrict the apps your employees can access via the file sharing solution through white/black listing
3. Only approve/white list applications to integrate with file sharing apps after they have been tested internally
4. Increase security by ensuring only the recipient can open up the document.
For more information on how organisations can reduce the risk of data leakage from unsecure file sharing, read this free Osterman Research report “The Need for Enterprise-Grade File Sharing and Sync”.
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