Biscom Delivery Server Blog

Over a year in the making, we finally launched version 4.0. This is a pretty big release for us and adds a number of exciting features! Read the full release here.

The launch of BDS 4.0 sets a new standard for ease of use in a secure file transfer solution. Simple and straightforward for end users, BDS 4.0 raises the bar for system customization, flexibility, and features that administrators will love. Some of those features include:

• Automatic file compression to accelerate file transfers
• Ability to upload entire folders (and their sub-folders)
• Outlook 2010 add-in
• Collaboration
• User preferences
• Support for OpenLDAP and SunONE LDAP
• AutoPost and AutoFetch utilities for automated transfers

SpaceX is one of those uber-cool companies that is doing what many of us wish we could – launch rocketships. Big ones. I fondly recall my little Estes rocket with the D engine. Well, these days, Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal, Tesla motors, and other ventures, has stepped things up from cardboard tubes and solar ignitors with his company Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. He’s launching massive lift vehicles to help provide transportation services as it’s getting pretty hard to supply the international space station with the impending shuttle retirement. And with a bevy of private space companies vying for various forms of space travel for mere mortals, someone needs to be the picks and shovels of the new gold rush.

We had a great conversation with Branden Spikes, CIO of SpaceX and he told us how they use BDS to send their confidential and large files securely and quickly to scientists, researchers, contractors, vendors, and other collaborators. SpaceX employees were spending way too much time sending files instead of launching rockets, so we stepped in and let them focus on what they do best, and let us worry about secure file transfers.

According to Spikes, “One of the biggest benefits of BDS is that it can run on our own network in the way I want to run it. BDS was the only solution that offered this level of configuration and customization….In fact, we’ve reduced the time to encrypt and send files from two hours to less than two minutes.”

Read the full case study if you’re a space nut like me.

Register for a luncheon that Biscom and Keno Kozie will be hosting in Chicago on August 4th. This luncheon will be a way for legal IT professionals to discuss file transfer technologies, how to lock down files during transport, collaborating with clients and external counsel, and replacing FTP servers with a more manageable and secure solution.

Biscom and Adapative Solutions have just announced the world’s first SFT integration with Autonomy iManage for document management. By integrating BDS with iManage, users can send files in their FileSite repository through BDS directly without having to copy files to their desktop and then send. When receiving files securely through BDS, iManage users can also save files directly to FileSite.

For more information on deploying BDS with your iManage solution, contact Adaptive Solutions. See the full press release here.

Our latest newsletter has just been published with the latest news, tech tips, and announcement of BDS version 4.0 this summer.

Biscom has partnered with TOSS to provide a hosted solution for transfering files. For smaller companies who have confidential, sensitive, or very large files to transfer, the GetSaaS Secure Files solution by TOSS is a great way to deploy secure file transfer services to your users quickly and easily. The best part about this, you’re using the same trusted and proven software solution that Fortune 500 companies rely on to transfer their most critical files and data.

We’re excited to partner with a company like TOSS who has years of experience in managed services. Read the full press release here.

New press release on our partnership with Keno Kozie, a leading provider of information technology design, service, and support to law firms and legal departments.

See the full press release here.

Biscom and Pro2col Ltd, a privately held company specializing in the supply and integration of network security and secure file transfer solutions, will demonstrate BDS at InfoSecurity Europe, April 27-29, 2010, Earls Court, London, UK. Pro2col and Biscom will be exhibiting together in Booth R88.

Our Legal Practice Manager Charlie Magliato is going to be hosting a webinar on managing large email attachments, with special guest Bruce Bial, IT Director at Riemer & Braunstein. You’ll see how Bruce and his team implemented BDS to handle their secure file transfer needs and eliminated large file attachments from going through their Exchange server.

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, February 25, 2010 from 2-3pm EST.

Click here to register!

Biscom was interviewed by the Boston Business Journal a few weeks ago, and the story just came out. At a time when many high tech businesses in Boston are hurting, Biscom stands out as a profitable, growing company, and it’s nice that we’re being recognized for that.

Biscom’s roots do go back to computer fax technology (Biscom invented the category of a computer-based fax server back in 1986), but Biscom has expanded its scope to include all kinds of document delivery, including secure file transfer, workflow, imaging solutions, cloud-based offerings, VM appliances, and Fax over IP.

You can read an excerpt here, but you’ll need to register to read the full story.

Sean Doherty at Law.com wrote a great review of BDS. I’m impressed with the level detail he included in his review — he really dug down deeply into the configuration and setup, but he also goes over usage scenarios in just as much detail. Sean’s audience is probably on the more technical side, and he gives that audience the necessary technical specifics they’ll want to hear about, but he also does a fine job of describing the business case for secure file transfer at a high level. I’d say this is a good primer for people in IT who would be responsible for deploying our solution.

We’ve just launched a brand new web site — it’s cleaner, more intuitive, has better content, and it’s just generally easier to navigate and find the information you’re looking for. Hopefully the site does a good job of explaining what secure file transfer is, and why it’s important to have a secure file transfer strategy.

A few pages I’d point you to just to start:

http://www.biscomdeliveryserver.com (of course)

http://www.biscomdeliveryserver.com/company/why-biscom.html

http://www.biscomdeliveryserver.com/support/faq.html

Happy surfing!

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!

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.

I’ll be speaking with Dave Brown from Rockland Trust (see previous blog entry) at the AIIM show in Philadelphia (March 30-April 2, 2009) and AIIM has been kind enough to provide a $200 discount for any new attendees. You can get the discount code here.

It’s going to be a fun session — Dave has a great story to tell, and I hope it helps others see the potential for a secure file transfer solution in their organization.

Biscom Delivery Server is being used in a lot of different ways — sending medical records and clinical data securely, sharing large multimedia files with design studios and PR agencies, distributing software to customers, and working with local, state and federal government agencies.

But one of our more interesting customers is Rockland Trust, a regional bank here in Massachusetts that is one of the few banks that is actually doing well and growing. Dave Brown, their AVP Information Risk/Security Architect, is what I’d call someone with vision. Or at least he saw the potential for BDS in his company. Dave and I are going to be co-presenting at the AIIM 2009 show in Philadelphia on April 1, 2009 on how Rockland Trust is using BDS to address multiple secure delivery projects internally as well as externally.

One of Dave’s many hats involves handling the data transfers when Rockland Trust acquires another bank. These bank conversions involve moving all customer information, deposits, historicals, and balances so that the customers of the acquired bank can, for example, go to an ATM for either of the banks, and get cash out. It’s also nice when the account balances are correct.

Dave’s been doing bank conversions for 20 years, has executed hundreds of acquisitions, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say he’s pretty much an expert on this. So, I take his word when he says that before BDS, there was a lot more to worry about, including whether the magnetic tape backups would be delayed because an airport’s snowed in (yes, this really happened!), or if the the tapes would arrive corrupted, or even if the reel to reel systems of the two banks would be compatible. There are a number of potential issues.

Dave used BDS in an acquisition recently and it apparently went so well, he’s “rewritten the book” on bank conversions, and BDS is now part of Rockland’s SOP. He now includes BDS in the project plans of all his acquisitions, and by doing so, the cut over is seamless for the bank’s customers. Instead of closing on Friday, and re-opening Monday, the acquired bank can be open for business on Saturday morning. The ROI for that is something we’re still trying to figure out, but think about this: no opportunity costs of a branch being closed for one or more days, customers don’t have to wait several days before being able to access their accounts via ATM or online, and the increased confidence and trust customers will have with a bank where everything is handled quickly, efficiently, and smoothly.

So, if you’re going to AIIM this April, you can hear Dave talk about how Rockland Trust is using BDS, not just for bank conversions, but also in all other parts of the organization.

My first blog and my first blog posting. Actually, Frank Kenney, Research Director at Gartner, paid us an onsite visit today, and suggested that it might be worthwhile for me to start a blog on managed file transfer (aka secure file transfer/intelligent file transfer) and to start evangelizing the concept. As someone who’s been quietly evangelizing this for the last 8 years, I guess this is as good as any forum to share news, industry events, and other thoughts on the state of the SFT/MFT market (like the military, tech is full of acronyms).

Biscom Delivery Server (BDS for short, to remain true to the acronym-phillic technology community), is an enterprise Web-based secure file transfer application. (EWBSFTA?) BDS enables people (or machines/automated processes) to send files and messages to each other securely, while tracking every transaction that can later be used for reporting and auditing purposes (think regulatory or compliance requirements). Basically, if you have a file that contains sensitive or confidential information that you can’t send over email because it’s either too large or you’re concerned about other people being able to view it, and FTP, PGP, and other security technologies are too complex for your end users, then you need our product. BDS, above all else, is easy to use!

In a nutshell, here’s how it works.

Questions? Comments? I guess I’m opening myself up to the world now, so fire away!