Archive for User Experience
January 19, 2011 at 11:50 am · Filed under Compliance, Managed File Transfer, Managed Services, Secure Information Exchange, User Experience
By Todd Doerr
Designing new products is a collaborative effort that requires the ongoing exchange of ideas. With business partners located around the world, it’s usually unrealistic to regularly meet in person, cost prohibitive to mail project files back and forth, and difficult to ensure that a project stays on schedule. Finding ways to quickly and securely exchange files electronically plays a critical role in the success of a project.
Time to market is essential to any industry, particularly retail where meeting deadlines is paramount to their business success. Collaborating with several outside designers on go-to-market products, a global retailer sought to improve both the communications and the way it exchanged files on new apparel and accessory designs with its designers.
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December 21, 2010 at 12:39 pm · Filed under Managed File Transfer, User Experience
By Todd Doerr
There is an extremely common procedure that has a significant impact on a business’s sales process: the ability to efficiently exchange large digital files with their partners and customers. Many companies dealing with sensitive or regulated data deal with this problem, but often fail to take into account the significant impact this has on key business processes.
For one global memory chip maker, transferring files that were either too sensitive or too large for email often resulted in the company coming up with alternative solutions to manually send large files to their customers and partners. This time-consuming process not only delayed receiving and delivering sales orders, but also put sensitive customer files at higher risk.
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September 16, 2010 at 9:52 am · Filed under Managed File Transfer, User Experience
By Johnny Wright
Whether through convenience or a lack of tools and knowledge, employees at organizations of all sizes continue to send large, and often times sensitive, files and information through unmanaged, unmonitored and insecure means like personal email, instant messaging, and social networks. This behavior is putting many companies’ network security at risk.
In fact, this year’s Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report indicated that 48 percent of breaches were caused by insiders, an increase of 26 percent over the previous year. Not surprisingly, among the reasons for these breaches were privilege misuse, which accounted for 48 percent and social tactics which comprised 28 percent in the report.
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May 18, 2010 at 12:31 pm · Filed under User Experience
By Johnny Wright
In a recent Processor article, entitled “Social Successes,” my colleague Craig Robinson contributed some valuable insight into how to implement process and infrastructure within an organization to provide employees with access to social media in a secure and compliant manner. The first step in achieving success, the article suggests, is for IT to develop “an in-depth understanding of the business area’s social media programs and their anticipated impact as well as the programs’ overall goals and definitions of success.” In other words, IT must examine how employees and organizations are leveraging it to achieve real world results.
As a marketing professional, I’ve become more reliant on social media to communicate with our customers and with the marketplace. Most customer-facing professionals, not just marketing but other areas such as sales and customer service, are increasingly using social media on a daily basis to complete their work effectively.
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April 19, 2010 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Risk Management, Secure Information Exchange, User Experience
By Johnny Wright
We are living in a world where we are forced to constantly think about the security of our personal information—when we bank online, at the gas station when we swipe our credit cards, and even as we submit personal information to the federal and state government. Malicious attacks demonstrate every day that our digital data isn’t as safe as we would like it to be, which is why it’s no surprise that organizations everywhere are dealing with increasing government and industry regulations, and customer and employee scrutiny.
BusinessWeek’s Corporate Executive Board discussed personal data security in a recent article: In addition to high-profile cases that invite this attention, “companies face the challenge of managing a greater volume of sensitive information, created by increasing digitization of employee, health, financial, and other personal data.”
BW’s Corporate Executive Board provides four key steps for mitigating the risk of breaches:
1. Understand the laws, requirements and standards for any data your company collects.
2. Educate and convince your functional partners to comply with the same standards as your organization.
3. Plan to fail—that is, have a backup plan in place in case you do suffer breaches.
4. Don’t take vendor compliance for granted.
While these are all important, valid suggestions, there is an extremely important step missing, one that speaks to allowing employees access to the tools they need (and can use easily) for ensuring the security of the data they touch, whether it’s moving within and outside of the organization or while it’s at rest on their desktops, a shared server, or elsewhere.
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December 16, 2009 at 2:00 am · Filed under User Experience
By Todd Doerr
Too often, we forget about the people who are using our software and whether they are really getting what they need from IT. Our days are taken up with fire fighting — talking about servers, scripts, firewalls, viruses, encryption, compliance, and so on. It is easy to forget about the users who are on the frontlines every day, sharing and exchanging information with customers and business partners in a variety of ways.
It’s time to pause and ask ourselves: What are the features and user experience needs that allow our business users, often low-tech, to easily leverage technology for secure information exchange? What do they really want in the solutions we provide? At the end of the day, we have to balance the business desires for speed and agility with IT’s need for security and control — by nature, we tend to focus a bit too much on the security side of the equation.
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