This month the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has served a Monetary Penalty Notice of £130,000 to Powys County Council, after the details of a child protection case were sent to the wrong recipient. The penalty is the highest that the ICO has served since it received the power in April 2010. The severity of the penalty reflects the fact that the local authority had already received a warning from the ICO to tighten up its security measures following a similar breach.

Over the past 18 months Pro2col has worked closely with a number of County Councils looking to implement a simple way of securing ad-hoc, person to person file transfers.  Additionally, with County Councils looking to centralise or share the cost of services (Shared Services), Ipswitch’s MOVEit DMZ with the Ad Hoc module has proved a very popular choice, especially considering the cost of the Enterprise licence in comparison to other vendors. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Ouellette, an author at SC Magazine produced a great review of Biscom’s secure file transfer software, Biscom Delivery Server 4. Installed using a VMware image, the reviewer rated the product based upon 6 key elements including Features, Ease of Use, Performance, Documentation, Support and Value for Money. Emerging with an overall rating of 5 stars – it was clear that BDS was found to be easy to deploy, easy to use, and it gets the job done when it comes to transferring sensitive data securely and simply. The numerous advantages such as multi-platform (Windows and Linux supported, and VM), Outlook plug-in, checkpoint restart, no file size limits, strongest back end encryption (AES 256-bit), extremely granular tracking and reporting, Web services SDK, and it’s simple, intuitive web interface means Biscom Delivery Server is one of the most comprehensive ad hoc file transfer solutions in the marketplace.

You can read the full SC Magazine Biscom Delivery Server review here or, for more information regarding the product please visit the Biscom Delivery Server product page on our website or contact Pro2col on 0333 123 1240.

According to a survey published by Osterman Research Inc. in June-July 2009, using a sample of large organisations (over 500 employees and $5 million dollar revenue), 82% of employees resort to using personal email accounts when sending large files.  This tactic is employed by many to evade the email server attachment limits imposed by IT departments.

Considering 20% of the organisations surveyed send in excess of 500 files a week, this is a seriously disturbing statistic when you take into account the ramifications of using standard email for file transfer.  The most frustrating aspect of this predicament, is that many IT professionals are fully aware of the risks associated with this method of file transfer in particular e.g…

•    Compromised security and non-compliance
•    Lack of tracking, logging and auditing
•    The absence of visibility and monitoring

…and consequently, have introduced strategies and procedures to combat the use of unsolicited file transfer methods. The problem is employees will continue to violate security and procedural policies if they aren’t provided with a comparable, alternative solution that offers the same, simple functionality as their email client.

The results also revealed that 55% of the organisations surveyed had seen a 20% increase in ad hoc file transfer activity during June-July 2009 – the largest growth across all of the business file transfer ‘requirements’.  Evidently, employees have an increasing need to send large files on an ad hoc basis, largely due to the dramatic increase in file size over recent years.

So the moral of this story is, if you want your employees to adhere to company procedural policies when sending large files on an ad hoc basis, IT departments need to provide them with an adequate alternative to their email server!

As I’m sure (or hope) you may have spotted in the news, we have recently added Biscom’s secure, Ad Hoc file transfer solution to our ever expanding product portfolio – another milestone in Pro2col’s endeavor to provide our customers with a wide range of secure, large file transfer solutions to meet their every need.

During our time in the file transfer industry we have spoken to lots of organisations across different industry sectors with a requirement to send large files on an Ad Hoc (or one-off) basis, a need that had been overlooked in the development of many secure file transfer solutions.  Ad Hoc file transfer solutions come into their own on the occasions that you really need to send a large file quickly and simply without the worry or expense of having to involve IT administrators to create or manage end-user accounts.  They will literally allow you to send the file in the same way you would when using an email attachment, minus the problems experienced when using a traditional mail server!

We wanted to take this opportunity to invite all of our readers to a special webinar being held on Thursday 29th October at 2pm (GMT).  Here you will be given the chance to see exactly how the solution works and to ask any questions relating to the Biscom Delivery Server, Ad Hoc file transfer or just secure file transfer in general!

To find our more about exactly what will be covered during the 1 hour webinar, please visit the webinar section of the Pro2col website.

If you are interested in attending please