The European Commission (EC) have publicly stated that the UK Government is not adequately enforcing European data privacy laws and is ready to clamp down on them in 2 months time.

Reported on the infosecurity web site and backed up by our recent discussions with the ICO; next year is likely to be the year in which Enterprises feel the full force of European legislation regarding the privacy of data.  Enterprises will be under increasing pressure to ensure that every step is taken to secure data both at rest (internally) and in transit (e.g. securing file transfers).

The powers at the disposal of the ICO are also being addressed with individuals responsible for data security breaches potentially being liable for custodial sentences.

Read more: European Commission warns UK over privacy legislation

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Pro2col are pleased to announce the addition of not one, but two new members to the team!  Working from our Bournemouth based Head Office; Michelle Grimaldi has been appointed as Pro2col’s UK Office Manager.  Following a 5-year stint as Office Manager for Apple Developments, a commercial property and maintenance specialist, Michelle seized the opportunity to take a short career break and travel around Australia and New Zealand at the beginning of 2009.  Commencing her new role with Pro2col in August 09, Michelle has already proved to be a real asset to the team with her excellent customer service and organisational skills.

Only last week John Smith was appointed to fulfill the role of UK IT Sales Account Manager at Pro2col.  A former employee of Quadnet Ltd, a London based value-added IT reseller, John made the brave move from the hustle and bustle of the city to relocate to the coastal lifestyle offered in sunny old Bournemouth.  With experience of establishing and nurturing large customer accounts including The London Borough of Islington, GDF Suez and Stonehage, we have no doubt John will be a key component in helping to drive the business forward.

Now with a total of ten employees throughout the UK and Germany, the growth of Pro2col’s team reflects the significant development of our product portfolio.  With additions such as Biscom’s Delivery Server and more yet to be announced (watch this space) Pro2col’s reputation as the UK’s leading supplier, offering a diverse range of secure file transfer solutions, is further reinforced by the latest additions to the team.

Much to his disgust (which to be truthful spurred me on even more), I thought it apt to include a little piccy of John so that our customers can put a face to a voice – lovely aren’t I

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A great communications tool that previously we’ve underused (we’ve just been so busy!), Pro2col are now active on LinkedIn.  Not only that, we’ve set up the File Transfer Technology Group – a place where we can share ideas and opinions and more importantly, hear what everyone else out there has to say about all issues file transfer.

To date discussions have ranged from file transfer security related…

U.S Congress have enforced acts eg. HIPPA & Sarbanes-Oxley to protect confidential information stored & exchanged throughout businesses & services. Should similar guidelines exist in the UK/EU?

To file transfer protocols…

FTP or peer to peer Portal?

I’d like some feedback from everyone on what they think are the three ‘main’ types of b2b file transfer. Here are my thoughts – have I missed any really obvious ones though?

To what’s in the news…

Accidental insider security incidents more frequent than malicious attacks

Illegal file-sharers could see internet connection cut

The group has only been active for a few weeks now and there are already over 75 members including several Pro2col employees:

James Lewis – Managing Director/Business Guru

Charles Snell – Managing Director/Technical Buff

Lindsay Lewis – Marketing Manager/General Dogs Body

We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on any of the above topics.  Even better – if you have a subject you’d like to discuss please join the File Transfer Technology Group and start a discussion – new members are always welcome.

Hope to see you on LinkedIn soon!

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File transfer requirements are diversifying at a rate of knots with more products available than I care to count, but for me there are three distinct types of solutions I believe the majority of the larger corporate and blue chip customers are interested in. These are;

Enterprise File Transfer – making use of email to deliver a message to the end user that provides them with instructions on how to download the files(s) with the added functionality of tracking and reporting.  This method is great for the ad-hoc user, requiring little to no training.

Managed File Transfer -  relates to the secure delivery of files, in many cases making use of FTP based protocols also providing additional functionality such as reporting and monitoring.  These solutions are generally embedded processes that are not seen by the users and underpin internal/external business processes.

Fast File Transfer – with businesses needing to shift large volumes of data over increasing distances across the WAN or Internet traditional delivery protocols such as FTP have been superseded with UDP based delivery solutions, which have the ability to send files significantly faster.  With the cost of Internet connectivity as it is, WAN acceleration technologies are becoming more frequently used to maximise the throughput over those connections.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has any suggestions for areas that we may have missed, specifically if you’re a vendor of the solution and are looking for representation in the UK.

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Right now there is a very clear shift towards Could Computing but are we all buying into the concept without considering the implications for our businesses?  Wikipedia describes Cloud Computing very simply as, “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.”  It goes on to explain that it can also be described as, “technologies that rely on the Internet to satisfy the computing needs of users. Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.”

The key points to pick up from the above description is that ‘business applications‘ are provided online and that the ‘software and data‘ are stored remotely.  With security of data uppermost in the minds of many an IT professional its worth pointing out that there has been a rise in the number of companies using online file transfer applications to send mission critical information to trading partners.  Whilst many of these systems encrypt the data in transit using a variety of options which invariably result in SSL or 3DES usage many don’t consider the implications of this data then residing on remote servers waiting for the secure collection by the intended recipient.

An interesting, yet worrying article by Eric M. Fiterman about called Cloud Danger: Drag and Drop Theft highlights the inadequacies in the audit tools for the virtual cloud space.  He points out that anyone with access to the servers providing your business with a service could very easily walk away with confidential information;

“If your service provider has physical access to your environment, any person with access to the virtual servers can perform activity on your server. Think that some malicious activity involving your virtual memory would be logged or monitored? It’s not likely; audit tools for much of the virtual-cloud space appear to be non-existent. This means I could easily perform some malicious activity on your server – such as copying a file containing personally identifiable information off your server – then rollback the state of the server to hide my activity. You’ll never even know it was taken.”

When chosing a file transfer solution its imperitive that you know not only that your data is going to be secure whilst traversing  the Internet, but also secure on the servers which host the data.  Whilst its almost impossible to guarantee the security of your data at any time doesn’t it make more sense to have an in-house securely managed file transfer solution?

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Pro2col has been on Twitter now for a while and we’re starting to get the hang of it with over a 1,000 followers now.  We hope to be able to be all things file transfer to the marketplace at some point, we’ve got a little way to go with our portfolio at the moment but we’re talking to a number of vendors about adding some additional solutions.  Watch this space!

As this is our first blog entry I want to keep in brief but at the same time introduce the UK team:

• James Lewis – Owner and responsible for Sales & Marketing
• Charles Snell – Owner and responsible for Technical Services & Support
• Lindsay Lewis – Marketing and Office Manager
• Bibi Langston – Technical Support Engineer
• Peter Fox – Technical Support Engineer
• Lisa Arnold – Sales and Accounts Administration

You can contact anyone of us via email by using our intials in front of @pro2col.com e.g. jl @ pro2col.com – obviously without the spaces!

We’d love to hear from anybody who’s got any burning questions about file transfer in general or specific solutions and if you’ve got any recommendations about Blog topics please feel free to get in touch.

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