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Yesterday's solution doesn't address today's issues

By
Sarah Carter
 on December 2, 2009 4:54 AM | | Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Eric Young.  Eric is FaceTime's Sr, Director of Field Services, and works with FaceTime customers to implement leading edge security and compliance solutions for Unified Communications and Web 2.0.  Eric's worldwide role gives him an insight into the global requirements of organizations implementing real time communications technologies to enable their businesses and works closely with our product team to ensure that FaceTime solutions remain at the forefront of the industry.

 

Yesterday's solution doesn't address today's issues.

 

I was onsite with a customer recently completing our fifth competitive replacement within the Fortune 400 in the past 6 months.  As the customer was detailing all of the requirements the previous solution did not satisfy, it made me wonder, how are other customers of these competitors feeling they are operating in a compliant fashion? 

 

If you, as a compliance officer or legal counsel, cannot make sense of a group chat conversation, cannot actually view the content of a blocked message, or can't see what folks are trying to post to a social networking site; how can you possibly defend your organization from SEC fines or from a lawsuit in a court of law? 

 

Security technologies evolve quickly, especially in the area of real-time communications - but the adoption of tools like Unified Communications, Instant Messaging and social media has grown exponentially - in many cases even without the knowledge of either IT or compliance.

 

Regulation and compliance changes too, with the times.  Most recently I've seen FINRA starting to address the issue of social media and issuing guidelines to member organizations and individuals on how usage should be treated. 

 

We all understand there is a big difference between "logging" and "being compliant" but knowing there are still some banks and other highly regulated companies using these legacy solutions that were designed for technology of a few years back, it begs the questions:  What are the minimum requirements for security and compliance for Unified Communications, Instant Messaging and Social Media?


And, what are you doing about dealing with emerging technology?

 

 

 

Guest Blogger: Damon Martin, of SKT on Unified Comms & Web 2.0

By
Sarah Carter
 on November 25, 2009 6:15 AM | | Comments (0)

Damon Martin, takes a primary role in the development of technical and sales direction for SKT, a national Unified Communications consulting firm based in the central US.  Damon executes consulting practices and sales methodologies developed to ensure organizations realize the promise of Unified Communications.

Here, Damon discusses what's changed in the workplace - and what's becoming more relevant.

For many of us that have been consulting on Unified Communications for years it is hard to see the transformations when they are happening.  I remember talking to organizations about CTI when the idea that your computer could talk to your PBX was bleeding edge.    There has been an enormous amount of discussion in the past year about Unified Communications and its business impact.  An interesting transition for me has been that I don't find myself answering the question "What is Unified Communications?" anymore.  Instead, I find myself talking to organizations about what Web 2.0 and social networking mean to their business. The reality is that those questions are a natural progression of the dialog.  There is an inherent link between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking tools and Unified Communications.


What is changing in the workplace?
There is awareness within today's workplaces that we have to find ways to become more productive.  The effects of today's economic environment and acceptance of the "new normal" have allowed us to see the workforce output that is expected for information workers at our companies.  That productivity is fueled by an increasing demand for a collaborative working culture.  There are several trends that are emerging in the new workplace:

  • Unwillingness to return to previous employment levels
  • Demands for higher productivity from information workers
  • Elimination of organizational layers
  • Increasing expectations for staff to take on a variety of roles and responsibilities

There is an interesting phenomenon of the new workforce; workers are finding an environment where they are being forced to collaborate with others at a much higher degree than was required previously.  This pressure has a logical conclusion that we are seeing play out in many organizations:

  1. Workers need to collaborate quickly and effectively and today's phones and email are not fast enough with most communications resulting in a voicemail or replies hours later.
  2. Workers have become accustomed to instant access to friends and family with text messages, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.

The result is that workers have a desire and need to use collaboration tools.  If we look at Unified Communications as a tool and explore its ability to add business value by driving collaboration, we can start to understand how social networking is an indication of the willingness of our teams to embrace Unified Communications and Collaboration.

Why is Web 2.0 relevant?
The key to the adoption of Unified Communications in the workplace is embracing it as a collaboration tool.  The question about whether people can use social networking tools to collaborate has been answered by the prolific growth of tools and social network sites.  The burden now is on solutions providers and vendors to help executives at companies understand how to leverage a Unified Communications platform to provide a tool-set.  Businesses need to continue growing productivity without returning to the staffing levels they that drove up costs.  We hear the question "how can we get our staff to embrace Unified Communications".  The key is to understand that they already have by tweeting feedback at a trade show or posting pictures of grandchildren on Facebook.  The vendors are doing a good job of showing demos of how Unified Communications works to IT departments.  In the interim, workers are finding ways to collaborate because they have to stay competitive and provide the output that is expected in today's workplace. 

Conclusion
It is time for the technology departments to accept that Unified Communications is not something that can be migrated to over time or tested for small user groups.  Businesses are not going to back away from demands for increasing productivity.  Workers have realized that collaborative communication is the way to make productivity sustainable.  We have to work to help organizations understand that Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) is where the consumer acceptance of social networking and the business software for Unified Communications come together. 


Damon originally posted this blog entry at the SKT Blog earlier in November 09.  You can follow Damon on Twitter.

Are these the Halcyon Days, or are they gone forever?

By
Sarah Carter
 on December 2, 2008 7:03 AM | | Comments (0)

[Halcyon:  Oxford English Dictionary: Definition  adj & n calm peaceful]

 

Sarah Carter definition:  sepia tinted memories of days where you only remember the good bits...often a rose tinted remembrance...

 

I don't believe I'm surprised anymore by what happens in our increasingly connected world.  Perhaps I'm a natural cynic.  Having been in the IT security industry for more years than I'll ever admit to, I'm naturally suspicious.  When Steve Gold, one of our well known journalists in the UK, Skype'd me an unsolicited article synopsis text file that he wanted to interview FaceTime about recently, I wouldn't accept the file until he'd answered a specific question I asked him in the Skype IM.  As I explained to Steve, "Sure, we Skype each other regularly, but just because I know you doesn't mean I trust you.  And I certainly don't trust your IT or some of the nefarious characters (I include myself in this list) you associate with and who send you files and information to investigate."

 

I remember, you see, the days of the "I love you virus", the days before we purchased anti-spam and email anti-virus without question. When I'd click on a link that someone in my trusted network would send me, or I'd open a .zip file and the only way that I could stop the resulted virus being propagated out to my entire contacts list, was to reach under my desk and pull out the network cable and then sit and wait red faced for helpdesk to come and rescue me. 

 

It surprises me that people aren't more suspicious, that there is a natural trust between users of real-time communications.

 

At FaceTime (in our labs and through working with customers) we see threats propagating over real time channels every day - protecting you from them, is after all our business.  We've seen Trojans come in over a public IM network, propagate out to all your buddies and then hop over to an enterprise IM network.

 

So, is it just a matter of time then before we see malware and Trojans and worms written specifically for unified messaging and communications platforms, written to take advantage of the inherent trust shared between users?  And are we currently in an equivalent halcyon period that I remember before ILoveYou and email?  Or am I worrying about nothing?

 

Time, I guess will tell.  But next time, I ask you for verification that you are who you say you are when you're sending me a file over IM, or when you're sending me your holiday pics over Skype...well, it's not that I don't trust you.  I just think the halcyon days are long gone. Am I the only one?

 

Unified communications cost savings go beyond IT and telecom. It's about streamlining the business.

By
Kailash Ambwani
 on November 18, 2008 2:13 PM | | Comments (0)
Elaborate marble facade of NYSE as seen from t...

Image via Wikipedia

While the financial crisis is still hogging the front page of the Wall Street Journal, I want to share one of my conversations with the senior management team from a financial services company during a recent visit to New York. It made me realize that companies are beginning to see UC as a method of cost control as opposed to only a way to increase collaboration and productivity, which helps them justify rolling out UC systems now as opposed to later.

 

Unloading assets is one way that firms on Wall Street are working to reduce cost. The financial services company I was visiting is selling off some of its buildings in Manhattan while encouraging employees to telecommute. Without UC, this would not even be an option. UC makes it possible by giving employees IM, conferencing, video and audio at home. UC allows companies to encourage more telecommuting, which in turn allows them to get rid of office space and reduce cost.

 

That's not the only example of long-term cost savings being the driving force behind unified communications. In London, I talked with a senior group of about eight people from a Fortune 500 company about their plans to roll out Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). Their goal is to have 10,000 people using voice on OCS by the end of this year.

 

When I remarked that this was the largest scale deployment of OCS Voice I'd heard of to date, they told me that they conducted a cost analysis and discovered that the entire system will pay for itself in one year. Rolling out a UC platform with conferencing, video integration, etc. means that this company can cut down on the cost of things like video conferencing, external audio conferencing, and external web conferencing.

 

Often, our customers cite reasons like productivity, collaboration or the new way of working to deploy Unified Communications. This was the second time I'd heard ROI as a reason for rolling out UC technology.

 

Both of these companies plan to use Unified Communications to cut back on costs. It's interesting to notice that more and more companies are realizing that UC actually saves them money along with increasing productivity and collaboration, which provides a great way to justify using these systems now.

 

My prediction? We'll see more stories about how ROI is driving the adoption of Unified Communications in the next 12 months.

 

What's driving UC at your company?

New Research: Tracking security incidents against a growing use of collaborative Internet applications

By
Frank Cabri
 on October 27, 2008 12:08 AM | | Comments (0)

For the fourth consecutive year, FaceTime has commissioned a survey of IT managers and end users to track the use of Internet-based applications - things like IM, Skype, P2P, social networking and other Web 2.0 apps. We also surveyed employee attitudes toward use of those applications and their impact on IT and the organization in terms of security, data leakage and compliance.

 

As in prior years, the research was conducted among a large sample of corporate IT managers and end users across all size organizations in North America, UK and Europe. The research study includes compiled data from more than 500 IT managers and end users. The results are quite revealing.

 

 

AnyInternetAppsChart 

    • Use of consumer oriented Internet applications has reached 97% of organizations, up from 85% in 2007 and, on average, companies report 9.3 applications in use by its employees on the enterprise network
    • 73% of IT managers report at least one security incident as a result of Internet application usage; Viruses, Trojans and worms (59%) are most common, followed by spyware (57%) for a close second
    • 37% of companies report an instance of non-compliance; 27% report accidental data leakage
    • IT managers report an average of 34 incidents per month, and the largest companies project $125K monthly to remediate Internet usage related security, compliance and data leakage issues
    • 51% of end users access social media sites at least once per day and  79% of employees use social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, You Tube) at work for business reasons
    • Sixty-eight percent of IT managers have archiving and retrieval methods for corporate email. About half that many--31 percent--store IM communications. One in four has copies of audio conferences (25%), while slightly fewer (20%) archive corporate Web conferences
    • If requested by corporate attorneys to reproduce IM communications--in the event of a lawsuit, for example--51 percent of IT managers could not do it. Thirty-eight percent because they have no such capabilities and 13 percent could do it but not in any practical time frame
    • Unified Communications suites exist at about 29 percent of IT respondent organizations. Ten percent have deployed pilots to a limited number of users, while 19 percent have deployed UC for the majority of their endusers

We'll be delving into various aspects of this exhaustive survey in the coming weeks, to break down just what this data is telling us about what's happening on corporate networks and what it means to both IT managers and end users.

Lessons from Yahoogate

By
Frank Cabri
 on September 24, 2008 12:53 PM | | Comments (0)

They say you can find anything on Google. Turns out it's especially useful when one is searching for personal data to crack a Yahoo! Web mail password.  

 

In the remote case you missed it: Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! Webmail was hacked last week, and the contents were posted on Wikileaks.  Wired reported that the hacker easily broke into Palin's Webmail, hoping to find incriminating evidence that could derail her campaign.

 

We see this happen a lot. While IT installs email and IM archiving software, the workforce moves their personal and sometimes ill-advised communications to what I would call rogue channels. These channels include Webmail, public IM, Skype, and even Facebook. Employees think that management doesn't monitor or control these tools and it becomes an appealing place for improper or even illegal activity to occur.

 

Michael Osterman explained this well when he wrote about the lessons IT should learn from the Sarah Palin Webmail hack.

 

More examples of infamous rogue channel use in recent times include Senator Mark Foley, whose IM conversations with a intern cost him his job. Jerome Kerviel, the French banker who alledgedly cost his company $7B, and Scott Sidell, the former CEO who funneled client lists to himself through Webmail.

 

What are your employees doing thru Webmail, personal IM networks and social networking sites?

 

When I ask IT professionals the above question the majority respond (very confidently) that nothing rogue or unsanctioned is happening on their networks. Common responses include, "We block it with our firewall" or "we have a policy against it."  Then we deploy an evaluation unit and provide a report of actual employee initiated traffic and it becomes clear: hope is not a strategy. 

 

As customers move to adopt Unified Communications platforms from Microsoft, IBM and others, I believe the same issue will exist - employees will use personal systems and corporate sanctioned systems interchangeably.  IT will have the hard task of managing policies and controls consistently across this heterogeneous environment. 

Unified Communications in real life

By
Frank Cabri
 on August 7, 2008 2:31 PM | | Comments (0)

I recently did a podcast interview with Michael Osterman of Osterman Research for Messaging News.

 

Here at FaceTime, we're immersed in unified communications every day. We talk to our customers about what they hope to get out of UC, what modalities (messaging, VoIP, Web Conferencing, etc.) they are deploying first, and how they are struggling with internal issues regarding architectural considerations, alignment with business processes, IT ownership and more. Sometimes I get too close to these issues, so it's nice to step back and think about how to answer questions like the ones Michael presented in a way that provides a broader market perspective.

 

I hope I did that in this podcast and I hope you have time to listen to it. For those of you with time constraints, here are some of the points we talked about:

 

  • UC is entering the workplace in much the same way as the original PCs, or more recently, wireless access points. Users are downloading consumer-oriented UC-like applications like Skype, and  reaping collaboration benefits.
  • Most organizations aren't deploying UC with multiple modalities all at once. They are starting with presence and  IM and extending to Web Conferencing and VoIP - putting policies in place that can be extending across future modalities once they are deployed.
  • Productivity through collaboration is typically the #1 driver for deploying UC, but cost savings and employee attraction and retention are close seconds.
  • More avenues are available to bring information into the organization and more options for employees to communicate outside the company. This means that security and compliance are top concerns when deploying UC.
  • IT wants effective management and control of all these communications options, but the bottom line is that forward thinking IT professionals want to add value - they are motivated by enabling employees to be productive and contribute to the success of the company.
  • When an organization rolls out UC they often find it exists in a heterogeneous environment that includes "rogue" consumer applications that do not go away. It's not uncommon to have 8-15 rogue applications (IM clients, file sharing tools, social networks etc.) running on the enterprise network. They may not all be bad, but they're not visible and not sanctioned.

 

Bottom line, management is looking for two things: strong ROI from its UC platform and a way to control the universe of consumer-oriented applications that employees bring onto the network. We see a range of company policies - lots of companies are experimenting and don't want to shut things down if it can provide a competitive advantage through better employee collaboration. Others are in an industry with stricter requirements and need to block or closely manage certain apps.

 

I'd love to hear how your company is dealing with unified communications, both the consumer and enterprise versions. Does the above ring true for you?

The Natural Progression of IMAuditor

By
Kailash Ambwani
 on July 15, 2008 10:30 PM | | Comments (0)

This week we announced a major update to IMAuditor. The most significant new capabilities are around data leak prevention, and it got me thinking about how our business has shifted over the past few years. 

 

FaceTime first introduced its IMAuditor software in 2001, half a lifetime ago in Internet terms. At the time, it became the standard by which banks monitored and recorded conversations their employees (mainly traders) were having over IM to comply with SEC regulations. Over the past seven years, we've refined and advanced the product to stay ahead of the changing Internet and changing employee behavior. Today, employees routinely communicate over social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, use Web-based file sharing sites like SlideShare and transfer information with P2P file sharing software such as LimeWire. That's the nature of the New Internet.

 

This also means that setting and enforcing policies for information is more complex than ever... hence, constant updates to IMAuditor. 

 

In parallel, it's been interesting to observe how my conversations with customers have changed over the past four years that I've been CEO of FaceTime. Foremost, our customer base itself has changed: from primarily financial services companies to large enterprises in general. And, the primary concern has shifted from regulatory compliance to security and integrity of enterprise data. Most interestingly, new triggers and pain points have emerged - from AIM to Facebook, from Napster to Skype.  As employees bring new Web 2.0 applications onto the enterprise network, protecting the organization against data leaks over these new channels is overtaking concern about incoming malware.

 

Something else is changing too: companies have started to realize that blocking these new Internet applications is not a solution. Especially in the case of IM, companies have seen the value of real-time communications and are rolling out unified communications suites like Microsoft OCS and IBM/Lotus/Sametime in an effort to realize these new productivity gains. And now, when savvy IT mangers discover that consumer-based applications like public IM or Facebook are in use on their networks, they realize that what they need is not a blocking mechanism but a good policy and some gentle reminders that help enforce it.

 

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying you should not trust your employees. But I've believed for some time that the biggest security threat to the organization doesn't come from the outside, it comes from the company's own employees. Not because people are malicious, but because people are people.

 

Last month, we commissioned Osterman Research to survey IT managers about their concerns for information leakage, as well as their preparedness to prevent it in their organizations. The most interesting data point for me is that more IT managers are concerned about unintentional or accidental information leaks than they are about intentional leaks or data loss from malware. Surprised?

Facebook Chat and Unified Communications

By
Brian Babin
 on June 17, 2008 12:23 PM | | Comments (0)

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting blog post by Mike Gotta, a principle analyst for the Burton group. I've been mulling it over and wanted to share my thoughts - but let me give you a recap first.

 

Gotta writes about Facebook's use of Jabber/XMPP for Facebook Chat and how he thinks this will impact enterprise organizations that are planning to roll out corporate instant messaging/presence platforms that are based in SIP/SIMPLE. Short term, Gotta does not expect Twitter's nor Facebook's use of XMPP to impact business decisions, but he predicts that XMPP in the near future could lay the groundwork for Unified Communications in the enterprise.

 

Gotta makes a couple of observations about IBM and Microsoft's position in the UC market. Here is an excerpt from his post:

 

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM's unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook's XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem - they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.  

Gotta makes a good point, but I'm not convinced the onus lies with the Microsoft gateway provider.  The Microsoft gateway doesn't support XMPP... ok, so what?  You can make the case that Facebook (in which Microsoft invested $240 million) and other sites will need to add a SIP gateway to support connections from OCS.  It's not a mandate, but one or a few sites may take the plunge and make themselves easily accessible to the millions and millions of (eventual) OCS users --- the others will have to follow suit.

Or Microsoft bites the bullet and adds XMPP support to their gateway but restricts it so that can't connect with their arch-rival Google.  That's possible.  But again, will a company looking at OCS say "Gee, sorry I liked the solution but chose Sametime instead because it can connect to Twitter"?  Maybe that day will come, but not any time soon in my opinion.

Everything Old is New Again: Enterprise 2.0 is the new Public IM

By
Eric Young
 on April 25, 2008 8:00 AM | | Comments (0)

I saw some interesting articles from the NY Times and the Enterprise 2.0 blog  last week about the vast number of Web 2.0 applications that are being used in corporate America - even though IT security feels that they have their environments locked down to prevent these apps from being used.  In his Enterprise 2.0 blog, Steve Wylie commented on the NYT article, pointing out that "the reality is that these apps are here to stay."

 

We've been tracking this trend for several years, and it's definitely growing - in fact, many companies are now facing the reality head on. I spoke with a large pharma org in NJ very recently that mentioned they have already setup MySpace and Facebook pages to allow their corporate users to collaborate internally and externally using these tools. 

Although this is probably frightening and new information for many security and compliance execs, this is the same trend we've seen happening since 2001 when this issue first appeared with the emergence of public IM usage within corporations.  The customers we spoke with back then told us the same story that people are saying today which is, the user population feels that they should be able to use these applications because they make them more productive, responsive and connected employees. 

 

From an IM perspective, this feeling turned out to be 100% true which is why so many companies are now broadly rolling out Enterprise IM and UC solutions.  Based on that history, its important for executives to quickly understand that this trend will continue and if they want their organizations to stay relevant and competitive, they should move to implement solutions that allow for the enablement of these applications so they can be used in a secure and compliant fashion to take advantage of their value, rather than spend time and money trying to find ways to block their use outright.

 

A recent SC Magazine article also covers this trend very well. With Generation Z's arrival in the workforce, IT faces a new group of workers who have "never taken a breath of air without being able to Google."

 

What's your opinion? Block or enable?

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