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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Process agility and Compliance - conflicting forces or a competitive advantage?

Summary: Companies are looking for ways to speed up their business processes. At the same time, they must comply with regulations governing those same business processes. How can you satisfy these seemingly conflicting requirements at once?


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Part of the fun in the business world is that there are often conflicting forces at work. Since Y2K, two seemingly contradictory forces have begun to do battle in enterprises big and small, only to leave confusion in their wake.

Force One is the need for organizational process agility as a survival prerogative. Develop products with partners faster. Get to market sooner. Reach interested parties - customers, partners and coworkers on the other side of the globe - instantaneously. Drive profits up and cost down today. In the famous words of Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. The ability to quickly adjust to the constantly shifting business landscape in days and weeks instead of years is one of the hallmarks of today's reality.

Force Two has emerged from new security and compliance regimes since the spectacular cases of governance failure at companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia. Explicitly through regulations and implicitly through business (best) practices, enterprises are now having to deal with higher hurdles in compliance and governance.

Without taking side on either of these driving forces, it is also clear that they each can demand quite different processes and the ultimate question for all the businesses is simply - how can you increase business processes agility but be assured that you are in compliance with every regulation that governs those processes?

At Accellion, we are constantly talking with companies that are looking for a way to improve their business process agility involving sharing information among internal users and colleagues outside the organization. The question they bring us usually is a variation on these three concerns,
1. How can we speed up the way we send and receive documents, video, graphic images and other large files,
2. while at the same time ensure the privacy and security of these critical business records
3. without complicated and time consuming IT administrative oversight?”

This, lucky you, is the exact question Accellion set out to answer when we developed the Accellion secure file transfer solution.

1. Send and receive files easily:
  • An internal user can send files to his colleagues by sending the files via the secure file transfer appliance. From anywhere in the world, the recipient can access those files over the Internet instantly. Not next day. Not in a few hours. As fast as you can click.

  • An internal user can give his outside business partners the authority to send files back into the company without IT intervention via the secure file transfer appliance. In other words, the internal user can collaborate with external users on critical work files without waiting.

2. Meet security, privacy, and compliance needs:
  • Only authorized users can access the appliance to send and receive files.

  • A file lifecycle management system ensures that files are left on the appliance only for a defined period of time. If they are not retrieved in that time period, the files are securely and automatically removed from the appliance.

  • Management reports provide audit trails of who is sending and receiving files.

3. No IT administrative overhead
  • With end user self-provisioning capabilities, IT involvement in daily operation is significantly reduced.

  • By bypassing email for file transfer, this also removes the occasional drama when a file, say an important proposal due in 15 minutes, is too large as an attachment.

  • Files are screened for viruses when they are placed on the appliance.

It comes down to this. Business process agility and compliance are two forces no enterprise can ignore. Interesting, instead of deciding which one is more important, sometimes they can work together to give you a competitive advantage.

If you know what is the right (Accellion) solution to use.

ACA Guy


Accellion in the News
Media Coverage

Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Journal
Sarbanes Oxley Compliance Journal - Track and Report Conformance During File Transfers
: Survey results confirm need for broader tracking and reporting features introduced in Accellion’s Courier Secure File Transfer Appliance.


ConstrucTech
ConstruTech - Perini Deploys Accellion
: ...[P]rotect our email infrastructure with the associated archiving systems while allowing users to send very large files as part of their regular business processes.

Press Releases
Barkley Selects Accellion to Solve Inadequacy of Email File Transfer

Keker & Van Nest Selects Accellion’s Secure File Transfer Solution for Its Large File Transfer Needs

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