If you’re in the government sector, new cloud services and products are likely in the plans for 2013. Cloud momentum continues to build according to InformationWeek Government’s third annual Federal Cloud Computing survey, which showed that half of its agency respondents are currently moving ahead with cloud adoption or are in the early stages of doing so – up from 40 percent last year.
So, what’s spurring this growth? According to the survey, the move to the cloud is being driven by three primary business objectives:
- Lowering the cost of ongoing IT operations (54%)
- Reducing capital investments in servers and data center equipment (51%)
- Supporting mobile productivity and collaboration within the agency and with other agencies (37%)
Number three on this list came as no surprise to us, as we talk every day with organizations – within the government and enterprise sectors – who are looking for more efficient, secure, and cost effective ways to access and share information on mobile devices with people inside and outside of the organization. That need leads them to Accellion.
For Accellion customer Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD), the ability to collaborate quickly and securely makes all the difference for the youth they serve. Operating dozens of treatment facilities, correctional institutions and halfway houses throughout the state, TJJD needed a way for its 2,500 employees to share confidential data efficiently and reliably between parents, medical staff and legal counsel.
Before switching to Accellion, staff members often turned to mailing hard copies of documents, burning CDs, or encrypting individual emails in order to work around a cumbersome file transfer and encryption mechanism. TJJD clearly needed a better option, fast.
The same could be said for other government organizations at the federal, state and local level that select Accellion. These customers include government agencies such as NASA, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the National Institute of Standards of Technology that have a need for the strictest security and compliance requirements for the sharing and collaboration of digital information.
If mobile productivity and collaboration are part of your cloud plans for 2013, we can help.
No one would be shocked to learn that organizations aren’t big fans of employees playing online poker or roulette on the job. Which is why, when 1,200 IT decisions makers at private companies were asked to name the top three worst apps that employees could download, gambling was at the top of the list, with 58 percent of responses.
Right behind concerns about bringing a bit of Vegas into the office are serious worries about certain online file sharing applications. But not just any apps – Dropbox and Box in particular. Fifty-one percent of survey respondents named these unapproved cloud file sharing apps as some of the worst offenders in the enterprise, earning the number two spot on the list. And, of the 45 percent of respondents who blacklisted apps, 57 percent named Dropbox and 42percent named Box as the apps being banned.
What happens is that users genuinely need a way to share large files and when there’s not an IT-approved solution in place they find one on their own. Consumer-focused online file transfer solutions, such as Dropbox, are then used behind the scenes to send proprietary documents, creating security risks and headaches for IT. It’s this need for a Dropbox alternative – a secure, proven, enterprise-class solution – that drives organizations to Accellion.
Accellion customer, MiTek, a global construction company, had been there, done that, leading the company to ban Dropbox, deploy Accellion, and not look back. Here’s what Justin Daniels, Web Services/Software Engineering and IT Support Manager with MiTek had to say:
“With public cloud providers, there are so many unknowns when it comes to security: Where exactly are your files? How do you get them back if you change providers? How do you know where your employees are sending files? We weren’t willing to give up the rights to data that was sensitive, proprietary, and was rightfully ours. With Accellion, we know exactly where our files are, can track and monitor both senders and recipients, and enforce file sharing policies at a user- and corporate-wide level.”
When customers say “yes” to Accellion, it makes saying “no” to Dropbox and Box a no-brainer.
In our last post, “New Research to Drive Your Mobile Policies”, we talked about how mobile devices are redefining the workplace, pushing the need for ubiquitous access to enterprise content. But, the big question is how to give users what they want – user-friendly, around-the-clock data availability – while maintaining strong IT security and control. It can be a big undertaking if you don’t know what to look for from a file sharing solution.
Here are 10 must-haves to help meet both users’ and IT’s needs:
Multiple platform support: Even if you’re a Blackberry shop today, you don’t know what the future holds, so you need to be able to support iOS, Android and Blackberry devices should the need arise.
Seamless access to existing ECM stores:Allow users to gain anytime, anywhere access to data – whether stored in SharePoint or another ECM system – and share files with internal or external audiences, without a VPN.
Enhanced encryption: To lower data breach risks, your solution of choice should encrypt data both in transit and at rest, across all devices – whether in the cloud or on-premise.
Centralized management: Easily configure user permissions and manage user policies and profiles, including role-based access controls – ideally from a single, web-based interface.
Proactive file protection:Extend your organization’s established content/file monitoring policies to all file sharing activities by integrating with commercially available DLP and anti-virus solutions.
Complete device control: Ask about remote monitoring, logging, and wiping capabilities, to provide much-needed visibility and control should a device be lost or stolen.
Required enterprise integrations: Ensure that the solution you’re evaluating will support your existing infrastructure, applications, and security processes, such as LDAP, Active Directory, single sign-on, authentication, FTP, and SMTP.
File sharing visibility: With evolving regulatory requirements, you need granular reporting capabilities, real-time file tracking, and automated audit trails to maintain compliance standings.
Deployment choice:Whether a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environment, evaluate which deployment provides maximum data security and availability and will have your users up and running quickly.
Say “no” to consumer-class services: Prohibit users from seeking out their own consumer-based solutions, such as Dropbox, to prevent being left in the dark about where files have been sent and to whom.
Extend security to every file and every device within your organization and embrace the BYOD trend. Your users will thank you.
With so many organizations wondering how to support the boom of mobile workers, we recently hosted a sponsored webinar, “Empowering the BYOD Workforce”, to provide insight into the state of mobile affairs, the evolving workplace, and what types of users are driving the BYOD charge. In case you missed it, Chris Silva with The Altimeter Group, LLC provided some great research to help guide the development and prioritization of BYOD strategies. Here are some highlights:
Smartphones are the “it” device: The pendulum is shifting from laptops to smartphones as the mobile screen of choice. Data from Nielsen shows that more than half (55%) of U.S. mobile subscribers have a smartphone – up from 41 percent last year. And that number will no doubt continue to rise with the anticipated arrival of new Google Nexus devices.
One device is not enough: The average worker now carries 3.5 “mobile” devices (smartphone, laptop, tablet, etc.), up from 2.7 last year, according to the iPass Q1 2012 Global Mobile Workforce Report.
Mobile computing is now the norm:Insight Research reveals that 89 of the top 100 companies offer telecommuting, with 67 percent of all workers relying on mobile and wireless computing to get work done.
Work hours are blurred: Research from Good Technology found that individuals are productive well beyond traditional office hours, with more than 80 percent of people continue to work when leaving the office, adding up to an extra 30 hours per month. Plus, 49 percent do work email after 10:00pm and 69 percent will not sleep before checking email.
Mobilizing sales is a must:The Altimeter Group, LLC found that field/sales employees are the most important user group to mobilize, as these road warriors live on mobile devices and need a simple and secure way to manage, view, store, and share information.
So, the big question is: how do you make enterprise file sharing accessible on phones and tablets to support the mobility trends outlined above, while maintaining tight control and security? Check out our next blog entry to learn how to navigate the security challenges of BYOD while enabling your growing mobile workforce.
This week Google announced that Gmail users can attach files stored in Google Drive to Gmail messages up to 10GB. “..whether it’s photos from your recent camping trip, video footage from your brother’s wedding, or a presentation to your boss, all your stuff is easy to find and easy to share…”, the company went on to say. Now, we’re OK with Drive being used for wilderness shots and videos of Uncle Bob cutting loose on the dance floor, but when it comes to business-related communications, like sending a PPT, we have to stop you right there.
For true enterprise collaboration and file sharing, we’ve found that size matters – as our customer, Mark Yee from AutoDesk, will tell you. That’s the beauty of our solution – there’s no hard limit on file size (Guinness World Records take note!) That means that our clients can send massive, data-intensive documents such as software upgrades, CAD drawings, media files, and customer databases, without wondering if a file is too big to be shared. And that’s been the case for years. Accellion customers have routinely sent files of 100-200GB in size and some brave souls have even sent 1TB files!
Plus, we provide tight security – integration with DLP solutions, automated audit trails, extensive file tracking and reporting, and customizable file access and storage controls – to make sure that your confidential data remains protected at rest and during transit. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
Google, welcome to the party, albeit a tad late. While 10GB is progress, it’s not going to cut it for serious enterprise users. While we believe that large email attachments should be phased out with dinosaurs and fax machines, we love the idea of our clients sending Stegosaurus-sized documents. We can’t imagine that ever going out of style.
Do you remember the first document you saved on a thumb drive? It used to be that employees wouldn’t leave the office without one – routinely saving board slides and keynote presentations on these mini storage devices. While still a popular giveaway at tradeshows (how many have you stockpiled over the years?), the idea of having corporate data floating around unprotected is too risky of a proposition for an enterprise of any size.
This has led organizations to seek out thumb drive replacements – solutions that are just as straightforward to use and provide anytime, anywhere information access, but with more security. Unfortunately, as Clive Longbottom, Head of Research with Quocirca points out, many have made a misstep, turning to cloud storage systems such as DropBox and Apple iCloud, which are only causing updated versions of the same problem. So, IT administrators then ban employee usage, but employees continue to use the solutions anyway, creating merely “a perception of security” because nothing has actually changed.
Longbottom urges enterprises to find a better approach. One that: 1) allows users to not only view and edit documents, but to share files with required external constituents; 2) supports any device and O/S combination; 3) is as easy to use as consumer solutions; and 4) applies granular security for storage and user access rights. We know just the answer.
Accellion kitedrive™ sync – dubbed “Dropbox for the enterprise” – makes sure that confidential data is securely and seamlessly synchronized, providing around-the-clock availability of all types of files. Users can work both online and offline, from both Windows and Mac environments, via smartphones, laptops, or other devices. As with all of our solutions, security is a top priority, and kitedrive is no exception, supporting LDAP integration, single sign-on through SAML, administrator activity logs, and integration with DLP solutions.
In addition to the new Mac availability, kitedrive sync also includes new features that give users control over the frequency of sync and which folders should sync. Details on these features include:
Selective Sync – Enables users to select and de-select syncing for shared files and folders.Selective Sync makes it easier for users to synchronize the content that matters the most to them. Users can decide which content they want to synchronize and when.
Scheduled Sync – Enables users to schedule the synchronization of files and folders. Users can easily get the most up–to-date content across devices with the frequency they want. Users can synchronize content on a frequency of every 60 minutes to every 24 hours. Kitedrive is the ideal cloud and file management enterprise solution, making sure critical business information is everywhere your users need it to be.
Accellion In Action: Pepperdine Secures Copier Files
When Pepperdine decided to implement a university-wide copier replacement program, the mission was to make staff and students’ lives easier. With 90 copiers across four campuses, individuals could scan documents as needed, convert files to PDFs, and send them to an email account. Sounds great, right? But, the big question facing IT was – just how secure is the process?
For Pepperdine, all documents needed to be properly encrypted, keeping financial and other personal information out of the wrong hands and enabling the university’s clinics and counseling centers to comply with HIPAA regulations. But, the encryption needed to happen behind the scenes, as the university recognized that if the new copiers weren’t easy to use, they simply wouldn’t be used by students.
With Pepperdine already using Accellion Secure File Transfer to send and receive large documents – powering much of the university’s communications – the university decided to also use Accellion to support its copier rollout. How? Users simply scan desired documents, the Accellion SMTP Satellite forwards the file attachments to the Accellion appliance, and once users return to their PCs, they’ll have a secure link waiting with the scanned items. Users don’t have to do anything new – a huge perk. Plus, with all documents sent through the appliance, the built-in security aligns with the university’s HIPAA compliance practices.
“When you have an IT solution in place that can be used to support and secure other key business operations, it’s a huge win,” said Michael Lucas, CTO with Pepperdine University. “Our users know – and like – Accellion Secure File Transfer, so extending the product to our new copiers was a no brainer.”
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