VMWare Technology Alliance Partner
We’ve just been certified by VMware as a Technology Alliance Partner at the Select Level which means we have VMware certified engineers on staff, and have basically jumped through a bunch of hoops to demonstrate our expertise.
We’ve actually been running BDS inside virtualized environments since 2005 and we have a fair number of our customers running BDS in a VM today. There are some great benefits to virtualizing, not all of them directly related to our product, but advantages that you should consider.
The advantages of running BDS in a VM are: more efficient use of processing power (which translates into lower power requirements and less rack space), easy separation of tiers for increased security without requiring multiple physical servers, fast re-deployment of the application if a VM goes down, and for the administrator, a centralized management console.
Whether you are already an experienced VM shop, or starting your journey to VM land, know that Biscom is there to support you!
TJX finally settles suits in 41 states for $9.75 million for the huge data breach that exposed up to 94 million accounts. Makes Ben Franklin’s saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” really resonate.
“This settlement ensures that companies cannot write off risk of a data breach as a cost of doing business,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. If you look at the risk reward ratio, it’s pretty skewed. It’s good emprical evidence that investing in security policies and tools is definitely worthwhile.
I just had a talk with Carol Baroudi, Security Research Director at Aberdeen, today. She wrote an excellent, data-driven whitepaper on Secure File Transfer which you can download for free here. Some of you may know Carol from her Internet for Dummies book. She’s updating her SFT whitepaper and wanted to find out what’s new in the secure file transfer space. Well, lots actually!
It made me think about what we’ve been up to in the last 6-12 months here at Biscom. We released version 3.1 of Biscom Delivery Server just last month, added a new compliance role, introduced a Chinese language version of BDS, set up a real-time monitoring tool for watching system activity and user transactions, added support for user quotas and user expiration, and have built new modules for automating many of the manual tasks of sending and receiving files.
One topic we covered quite a bit is the cloud. We’ve been secretly offering a cloud version of BDS for a while now, and will be coming out with an official offering soon. We see a big market for cloud computing, and secure file transfer really fits in nicely as a cloud solution — no CAPEX, reduced management of physical servers, robust performance, scalable performance as demand increases, and often it’s faster because of better availability of bandwidth. We’ve also designed our cloud solution with our premise solution in mind, so customers can start off with our cloud offering, and easily migrate to a premise solution as their needs change. Moving from cloud to premise, end users will not see any change in the user interface or have to change their existing behavior, and all their files and deliveries will still be available. Companies can also go the other way — from a premise to cloud solution just as easily! The hybrid approach that we’re taking offers a lot of flexibility to our customers. Many want to explore the cloud, but would like an easy alternative if they need it brought in-house, or vice versa. Carol calls it “security as you like it,” and I think that’s a perfect description of our hybrid model.
SharePoint deployments are becoming increasingly common, and we’ve been hearing a common concern from IT folks who have installed SharePoint in their network. As usual, Microsoft is trying to do a lot with SharePoint, including collaboration, content management, business intelligence, enterprise search, and portal development. However, it seems that many companies are using SharePoint primarily for file sharing. CMS Wire noted this concern last year: SharePoint Security Concerns Simply a Lack of Governance?
Many of today’s corporate environments are embracing enterprise CMS solutions as a way to disseminate and share information amongst workers and workgroups. Microsoft SharePoint is a popular choice because it aligns well with an existing Microsoft-powered network and project groups’ workflow. However, according to new research from Courion, companies who are deploying SharePoint are doing so in a manner that might be putting crucial data at risk.
According to Courion’s web-based study, 86% of IT managers are concerned about sensitive data being exposed on SharePoint sites when SharePoint is used outside of applicable data security guidelines.
Think about it — companies can put a lot of sensitive information on their SharePoint sites, and because SharePoint can give almost anyone the ability to publish content and files out to both internal and external users, IT managers have a new hole to plug: unauthorized SharePoint sites that are exposing confidential corporate data.
We’ve announced our support for a solution that will help IT managers provide a method of sharing files through SharePoint securely using Biscom Delivery Server.
