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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

How One CIO Escaped E-Mail Attachment Hell - Accellion Leads the Way

Summary: CIO Magazine featured a story on how Accellion helps a financial services company escape the large attachment trap and turn its Accellion investment into a competitive advantage.

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Laurianne McLaughlin the CIO magazine technology editor for “Essential Technology” wrote a story about “How One CIO Escaped E-Mail Attachment Hell.” There are plenty of good lessons here for every CIO to take to heart, no matter what business you’re in.

The CIO in question is Fred Danback of Integro Insurance Brokers. Mr. Danback’s enterprise email system was creaking under the weight of large attachments. His IT team was dealing with bloated email servers, slow system response times, and message delivery failures.

He tried to address the problem by asking employees to forgo attaching large files to their email messages. His “pretty please” plea didn’t work, largely because the business was dependent on employees being able to exchange large files among themselves and also with partners and clients outside the company. Preventing the large attachments clearly wasn’t a solution; he had to find a way to get the files to the people who needed them, while at the same time taming the email issues. If he didn’t resolve the problem, Integro was at high risk of losing business with its blue-chip clients.

The article noted that Integro's e-mail system, supporting some 400 users in five countries, was groaning under weighty attachments. "There's a lot of document transfer that takes place. We may get CAD drawings, MPEG files, technical specifications, it runs the gamut," Danback says. Not only was his internal system being taxed, but also, his users were bumping up against problems with clients receiving their messages, since many firms limit attachment sizes to prevent problems like denial-of-service attacks, Danback says.

Alas, these problems are universal for almost any kind of business today.

Of course, by now you are guessing how Mr. Danback and Integro solved their problems. Yes, they installed an Accellion secure file transfer appliance. For just a few thousand dollars, the appliance immediately eliminated the email system's burden of transporting large files. And because the appliance integrates with the email system, the users didn’t have to learn a new process to use their new tool.

Maybe even more important to Integro is that this new method for getting files from person to person is giving the company a competitive advantage. Ms. McLaughlin tells it like this: Danback's business users like it for another reason. Because their insurance industry competitors are dealing with the same large documents and e-mail woes, anything Integro brokers can do to make their interactions with clients more seamless can only help them win business, Danback says. "We had to find a way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors."

The moral of the story for CIOs feeling the pressure of large attachments, sagging email systems and growing business needs? I couldn’t have said it any better than Ms. McLaughlin and Mr. Danback:

The more attachment-heavy your company is, the more an appliance [like Accellion's] makes sense in terms of ROI. If you have complex discovery and compliance needs, you will want to consider using an appliance in concert with e-mail archival software. Both of these product categories are growing, with good reason: Another recent Osterman Research study found that 59 percent of enterprises call messaging storage growth a serious problem. And messaging storage needs are growing at a clip of about 35 percent per year, according to Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research.

What's Danback's advice to other CIOs about e-mail appliances? "Look at what could go wrong with your e-mail and do something about it now. So you don’t get yourself in a situation where you have proprietary or secret information in the public mail," he says.

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Accellion in the News


Media Coverage




How One CIO Escaped E-Mail Attachment Hell



File transfer security the easy way



Press Releases


* Microsystems Selects Accellion’s Secure File Transfer Solution for its Large File Transfer Needs

* Accellion Makes Global Collaboration Easier With Internationalization of Secure File Transfer Solution

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