Posts Tagged ‘mobile productivity’

The Third Wave of Mobility – From Access to Interaction to Productivity

Thursday, May 30th, 2013

The early days of mobile access to corporate e-mail is littered with now-defunct platforms, including Danger, HandSpring, Palm and others. It was Research in Motion (RIM) that launched the first wave of true enterprise mobility. With its well-designed Blackberry handset, robust operating system and highly secure network, RIM revolutionized the space, for better or worse, turning the mundane task of checking e-mail into a must-do activity at dinner, social gatherings and any other time.  Some of you may remember this as the “CrackBerry” era.

Apple heralded the second wave of mobility with the introduction of the iPhone and iPad, and the Apple App Store. While the devices themselves were never intended to be corporate workhorses, people’s love affairs with “Designed by Apple in California” has fueled an entire software development industry, churning out apps to appeal to every user’s needs or desires. As of this month, Apple is approaching 50 billion app downloads, with a run rate approaching 2.5 billion per month – and accelerating.

While the iPad has spawned an entire me-too tablet industry, the second wave has also thrown down the gauntlet to IT, forcing organizations to radically alter what they consider to be “corporate” devices. People simply cannot get enough of their app-rich devices, are not willing to leave them at the company gates.

Initial efforts to squash the BYOD revolution have given way to acceptance that these devices offer too many benefits to be excluded from the corporate roster of computers. Plus, banning them only creates another shadow technology world, where workers copy content off the corporate networks, store it in cloud file shares, and sync it back to their iPads or Android devices.

Now we are entering the third wave of mobility, the era of mobile productivity. Beyond e-mail access, beyond viewing and sharing files on an iPad, organizations are looking to enrich existing business processes and boost productivity. The benefits of a mobile workforce have already been established, and the value of the 3.5+ mobile devices that most knowledge workers carry is beyond question.

But there is an increasing recognition that existing enterprise resources and infrastructure, including SharePoint repositories and other enterprise content management systems, also offer significant benefits to the organization – the equivalent of the solid concrete foundation underpinning a new and airy corporate office. The conversation has shifted away from the polarized, philosophical questions – “Should we allow personal mobile devices?” and “How can we block access to cloud file sharing services?” – to a more inclusive, action-oriented focus: “How do we use mobile devices securely to expand the boundaries around how, when, and where employees are productive?”

Is your organization ready for this next wave of mobility?

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Posted in BYOD, Mobile | No Comments »

Printing Moving from PCs to Mobile Devices

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

Today’s users expect PC-like functionality from their mobile devices, including the ability to print documents. According to an October 2011 report from research firm IDC, mobile printing is the fastest growing segment in the document solutions industry and is expected to grow from 68.3 million in 2010 to 1 billion in 2015.

As the use of mobile devices in the work place increases, many employees want to simply click “print” from their tablet or smartphone and print to their normal workplace printer. Unfortunately, this option is not available on most devices.

In many companies, IT has misjudged the need for mobile printing and is now realizing that employees need to print from these devices just as they would from a laptop or desktop. IT also needs to maintain strong authentication and role-based security features, to ensure that mobile printing doesn’t create new opportunities for data breaches to occur.

The benefits of deploying a mobile printing solution that offers robust enterprise security features and maximizes the mobile productivity of your workforce are worth exploring. Organizations that enable mobile printing can accelerate field and back office processes, save time, and most importantly improve mobile productivity.

Accellion’s mobile printing solution features embedded printing technology from Ricoh.  View a use case for mobile printing here.

 

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Posted in Accellion, BYOD, Mobile, Product | No Comments »

Your Deleted Cloud Files Are Far From Gone

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

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.

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Posted in Accellion, Cloud, Data Security | 1 Comment »

Is Your Organization’s Productivity Keeping Pace?

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

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.

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

Are Consumer-based Apps Multiplying Within your Organization?

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

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.

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