Biscom Delivery Server

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.

We’re hosting a webinar with Derek Brink, VP and Research Director of IT Security at Aberdeen Group. Before joining Aberdeen, Derek was VP of Strategy at RSA, and has deep knowledge of security, encryption, and file transfer technologies. Derek will be discussing the growing threat of internal data breaches and what best in class companies are doing to prevent these problems.

So, mark you calendars for March 11th, 2009 from 1-2pm ET and register for this webinar. You’ll have the opportunity to talk to Derek and also have access to one of Aberdeen’s whitepapers on Secure File Transfer at the end of the webinar.