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.
Ever wonder what type of toothbrush your dentist uses at home? Or how often your trusted mechanic gets the oil changed on his/her own car? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what products and practices the experts actually rely on behind the scenes? Well, thanks to a recent article in The Guardian, we gained a glimpse into how the mobile productivity editor of TIME Magazine – Harry McCracken – stays productive while out and about on the reporting scene.
Here’s some of what we learned:
• Harry’s tablet of choice? An iPad.
• A good keyboard is key: A keyboard can transform an iPad from a media consumption device into a legitimate productivity tool. Sure, some people do just fine with on-screen typing, but for Harry, he wanted a physical keyboard to be able to see more of his writing at one time. He’s tried out a lot of models and has found his favorites are from two companies – Zagg and Logitech.
• Desktop be gone: McCracken has traded in his desktop for a laptop at the office, although you’ll usually see him on an iPad, even when at his desk. He said that he traveled with his laptop for a while as a security blanket but then realized that the iPad could support his mobile computing needs just fine.
• Skeptics are everywhere: Despite being on the cutting-edge of mobile technology, Harry’s reliance on tablets has been met with raised eyebrows. “People get very defensive when someone is taking a different approach to computing then they do. My feeling is, there is no wrong way to use computers. If you’re happy and productive, all ways are equally good.”
Are you using a tablet for your day-to-day job? If so, check out the latest news on our Secure Mobile Productivity Suite, which allows employees to easily create, edit, and share files on a mobile device without exposing sensitive business information. It’s mobile productivity at its best.
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?
Whether you are an organization with 50 employees or 50,000, finding a way to manage and secure employees’ mobile devices and access rights to corporate data is imperative. BYOD policies aren’t just for the big guys. If employees are bringing smartphones, tablets, or other devices into the office, then the chances are good that those same employees have plans to use (or are already using) those devices to access and send work-related files. It’s up to the organization to dictate when and how that happens.
We’re seeing a positive uptick among SMBs addressing the mobile device movement, with new research by iGR showing that 62 percent of IT managers at SMBs have an official BYOD policy in place. Yet, the same research found that 73 percent unofficially permit workers to use personal devices for work purposes.
It’s great news that so many smaller organizations have put a stake in the ground with a written BYOD policy. Hats off to you! It’s the 73 percent that are allowing employees to use devices without any official parameters that has us concerned.
Acknowledging that mobile access is a work must-have is an important first step. But, that needs to be followed with IT controls to ensure that files are being accessed only by authorized users, all mobile content is being shared securely, and that users are only turning to file sharing applications that have been thoroughly vetted by the organization.
So whether your organization has less than 50 or more than 50,000 employees, consider secure mobile file sharing an essential element of your mobile strategy, and make BYOD an official order of business.
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. Accellionpresented 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 appsin 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.
How One IT Department Stood up to Dropbox and Just Said No.
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.
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