By: Frank Toscano, Director of Product Management at Cleo
A company with employees in the building and across the world relies on quick communication and easy collaboration with all of its team members and partners to do business in a better way. But this is easier said than done, and a busy IT department often ends up spending precious time trying to facilitate other departmental needs while still maintaining control of key business data.
Keeping track of what corporate data (often sensitive) is coming in and going out, who’s receiving which files and when – all with multiple disparate tools – can become an infinite cat-and-mouse game. (And this is before mentioning the “shadow IT” deployments in any organization that compromise security and governance.)
Think of a support team that needs to push software updates to a customer with multiple data centers; a remote project team that is trying to meet a deadline; or any other type of time sensitive content that has to be pushed out to multiple collaborators. Enabling multiple workflow automation processes moves focus from the routine daily minutiae to the more critical business tasks.
Out with the Old
Organizations are slowly integrating a wider range of platforms and technologies to share information. While email is still the most commonly used method, organizations are gradually adopting and integrating various file transfer technologies. And for good reason.
Email is easy, but it has its limitations, like file storage limits. When users don’t manage their inboxes, and email servers overload, corporate data gets put at risk when users turn to free email accounts to share critical business data. What’s even more frustrating: More and more files that need to be shared exceed email attachment size limitations.
And then there’s the consumer-grade cloud file sharing services, which don’t meet the security requirements for a variety of industries and often hold your data hostage through encryption key ownership. Given advances in technology, there’s a better way.
In with the New
Central management and distribution from a business-grade secure file-sharing solution – and one that’s not necessarily cloud-based – streamlines the communication process and keeps teams on task while:
- Recording audit trails
- Maintaining security and compliance
- Delivering overall usage patterns
- Improving process automation
Some key benefits to be gained from a business-oriented, on-premise file-sharing solution:
- Knowledge is power: Know who exactly is collaborating on a folder at all times.
- Assigning permissions and expiration dates: Set it and forget it based on business role, and limit the duration of folder access to non-essential team members.
- Track participation activity: View collaborators who have uploaded and downloaded a file and when. Follow up with those who haven’t.
- Automated email notification: There’s no need to go into Outlook, find/set up a distribution list, and write a new message. Alert every collaborator right from your file-sharing solution with one click.
- Flexible communication: Enable multi-protocol access to folders (share files with people and also business partners using their preferred secure methods).
Business Cases
If time is money, take a stab at estimating the potential savings if your regular business activities include:
- Securely exchanging payments, transfers, financial records, and other data from a variety of sources.
- Transferring large log files between data centers.
- Enabling community management, registration and activation, self-service account management, and support operations.
- Enabling multi-protocol communication to quickly connect to a variety of partners with industry-agnostic technology.
- Scaling to meet enterprise-wide uptime requirements with fail-safe redundant architecture.
- Transferring and integrating data exchange between your service and your customers.
A central platform that gives users the opportunity to enhance their own productivity in the workplace aligns IT goals (security and compliance) with business goals (daily production and ease of use). Discover how a next-generation secure file-sharing implementation delivers automation and more collaborative functionality to boost employee and system outputs.
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Frank Toscano is the Director of Product Management at Cleo and leads Cleo’s product planning strategy, new product introduction, and product innovation. Toscano has more than 15 years of experience and knowledge in software and technology services, spanning sales, marketing, business development, and technical operations.
