If I had a dollar for every CIO who has told me a Dropbox or Box security horror story, I’d be well on my way to retirement. Consumer-based file sharing solutions continue to plague organizations, popping up throughout departments without IT’s sign off. Even those high up on the corporate ladder are guilty as charged, with a survey by SafeNet Labs finding that 40 percent of executives use Dropbox to store and share documents fully knowing it’s against company policy.

Global IT leaders are increasingly concerned about where and how their data is stored, and the cloud services they’re implementing, according to a new survey from NTT Communications.

Recent security questions that have been raised around Box and Dropbox’s ‘enterprise’ or ‘business’ solutions have made many organizations stop and question how exactly they’re sharing their sensitive data. 

Be honest. How would you rate your mobile security: poor, adequate or excellent? If you answered “excellent” then consider yourself among the elite. Only five percent of organizations we surveyed (in conjunction with ISMG) rated their security policies as such, compared to 75 percent who believe their processes are either “poor,” or “need improvement.”

Dropbox threw its hat into the enterprise ring this week when it exited beta, and made its Business solution available to workplaces worldwide. However, despite its claims that the solution is now ready for enterprise use, there are still plenty of red flags being raised about their security protocols and functionality, not least being their public cloud architecture.

Accelerating sales cycles, and getting to “yes” faster, is the goal of all organizations and recent survey results indicate that mobilizing the sales team can deliver significant productivity improvements. According to a recent study by Constellation Research, mobilizing a sales team:

IDC estimates that there will be 40 Zettabytes of data on the planet by 2020. That translates to approximately 5,247 GB of data for every person on earth, including you. Therefore, it probably comes as no surprise that the analyst firm in turn predicts that enterprise data stores will grow an average of 60 percent annually. How can IT keep up, to ensure all data is shared and stored securely?

I call it the “public cloud handoff.” You select a public cloud service provider to support a piece of your business and then hand over responsibility for your critical business information, putting the onus on the vendor to care for your enterprise data as if it were their own. However, operating with an “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy can cause serious risk to your data security.     

Every now and then something crosses your desk that makes you stop for a timeout.  As someone who has worked in the technology industry for more than 20 years, it’s safe to say that I love technology. However the stories that were shared with me today from our customer Seattle Children’s Hospital on their use of Accellion secure mobile file sharing are truly inspiring. Enabling the delivery of critical medical treatment to babies – this is technology delivering true value.

A new study by Avanade, an Accenture and Microsoft joint IT consultancy firm, found that 61 percent of companies worldwide believe cloud sprawl is causing inefficiencies in their business.