Woe the poor business person as she rushes to her next meeting. She has to meet a customer at 10:00 and realizes she forgot her presentation. She jumps in a cab and calls someone back at the office.
“Would you please email me that presentation we worked on yesterday?”
“It’s too big to go through our email system. Remember IT put a 10Mb limit on attachments.”
“OK, put it in Dropbox. I can get it as soon as I get to the customer’s office.”
“Are you sure? This has all that financial data in it. What if it gets out to our competition?”
Does this sound familiar?
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Today Fasoo launched DigitalQuick, its new beta cloud security service. This is very timely with all the recent news about cyber espionage and hacking by the Chinese army. Sophisticated computer hacking makes all of us more vulnerable to data breaches and theft of our intellectual property.
These hacking stories make me realize that no one is immune. Stories about cyber espionage focus on either stealing corporate secrets or infiltrating government or infrastructure systems. The Chinese hackers seem to be targeting companies and trying to steal intellectual property. This information is typically sitting in documents on desktops, servers, mobile devices and in the cloud.
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I recently read an interesting article in CloudAve titled, “Sure Dropbox is Potentially Insecure, but does it Matter?” The article highlights the trend of corporate users bypassing IT Security and exchanging files with co-workers and external third parties. They researched the types of corporate staff that use Dropbox and other file sharing services to exchange information.
The article goes on to state that they believe the majority of the files are not confidential and if shared with outsiders don’t pose a serious threat to the company!
Look at these statistics from a report by Nasuni on Dropbox usage. Based on this information, I would say a lot of executives and people generating intellectual property (IP) are using Dropbox.
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According to recent research by Gartner, people around the world will buy about 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets in 2013. That will account for around 70% of all devices sold.
This accounts for businesses and all of us using personal smart devices in our daily lives. Just to give you an idea of how ubiquitous this is becoming, this morning I was at my local garage getting my car inspected and a very elderly gentleman was sitting next to me on an iPad with a keyboard. He was watching some family videos and checking a few things on the web. The television was on in the waiting room, but no one was paying attention. Everyone was on a phone or tablet, including me.
“For most businesses smartphones and tablets will not entirely replace PCs, but the ubiquity of smartphones and the increasing popularity of tablets are changing the way businesses look at their device strategies and the way consumers embrace devices,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “In 2016, two-thirds of the mobile workforce will own a smartphone, and 40% of the workforce will be mobile”.
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I heard this great story the other day about the clash of old and new technology. Some of us (me) are old enough to remember a time before computers. I even remember when gasoline was $.29 a gallon. The best technology around was the telephone (and the TV) and most electronic communication was done using telephony-based systems.
I was listening to the TWiT podcast and Brian Brushwood was talking about a recent trip he had to Indonesia. Brian had to get travel and work documents approved from the Indonesian government. Since he had to do this before he got there, they sent him the documents electronically, sort of. As he was telling the story, I expected a rant about using a fax machine. If only. The transaction was done using Telex.
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