Recently in Unified Communications Category

• you can ever find it again, even though you know it's in that pile somewhere
• it will be complete, maybe the dog ate half of it
• that it will come back looking the same, maybe you spilled coffee on it or you printed out several pages and they've been mixed up so the order is wrong
  
• that someone else can look through the pile and find the piece of paper
• different things of difference genres or sizes will fit or stay in the pile properly

2010 marks my tenth year with FaceTime - and I've seen some changes in those 10 years - no more so than in the Financial Services sector, where Vantage, the product that I manage excels.  Having a third party organization verify that is exceedingly gratifying - and that's what happened recently.  At the SC Magazine Europe Awards in London, Vantage was unveiled as the Best Security Solution for Financial Services.

Perhaps it's the pedigree - Vantage is based on the equally award winning IMAuditor, perhaps it's the new features that we rolled out recently (from support for Microsoft OCS CAC, to Group Chat support and Skype).  Maybe it's the product manager....

Ultimately, I think its that we absolutely understand the requirements of financial institutions, their reliance on real time communications, rigorous regulatory requirements and we do this alongside our understanding of the real time collaborative internet. 

Features such as real-time logging and policy for Microsoft Group Chat, data leak prevention for file transfers, zero day worm protection, inline legal disclaimers and a full 360 degree audit capability make Vantage uniquely positioned in heavily regulated industries such as Financial Services.

Who am I kidding, of course it's all due to the product management....

Brian Babin is Director of Product Management for FaceTime's Vantage and Insight products and celebrates his tenth year with the company in 2010

The drive to extend collaboration outside of our own network boundaries has never been so strong.  Whether our drivers are to save cost, a geographically challenged work force, a diverse supply chain network or reduce time to market - we're all looking to collaborate and communicate with individuals who don't necessarily adhere to the same security, management and compliance controls that you have on your network.

And we're using a variety of tools, I hesitate to admit to how many different applications I use to communicate, not just internally here at FaceTime, but with suppliers around the world, our channel and strategic partners, prospects and customers.  It's probably a good exercise actually to think about that right now.

My real time communications tools:

• Microsoft OCS
• Microsoft Live Meeting
• IBM Lotus Sametime
• Lotus Sametime Unyte
• Cisco Webex
• Skype
• Windows Live (MSN)
• AOL
• Yahoo
• GoogleTalk

Wow.  There's a wonder I ever get any work done with that little lot eh?

But I'm not unique.  It's representative of the world in which we work now - that enterprise deployed Unified Communications platforms, like OCS and Sametime are co-existing alongside those Web 2.0 tools that I installed myself - because - well because that's how I communicate with different folks around the world.

The need to secure and manage the whole picture has never been stronger either. The same risks apply in our 2.0 world as always did in a 1.0 world - so whether your bugbear is inbound threats, outbound data leakage and managing your errant employees - all these areas require consideration.  I guess the only problem is that in a 2.0 real time world - the issue becomes apparent, well, in real time.

Compliance too affects real time communications.  Regulatory bodies, from the SEC, FINRA, HIPAA to the Financial Services Authority have all issued guidelines and rules on use and retention of real time communications - they are, after all, simple electronic communications, and subject to the same regulation - AND LEGISLATION - that your email is.

If you want to take a look at just how much growth there has been in the usage of real time communications tools and how prepared the average organization is to deal with security, management and compliance issues- take a look at the results of FaceTime's fifth annual survey - and compare it to what's going on in your organization.

Today, we launched Vantage, the successor to IMAuditor. 

IMAuditor - farewell old friend, but our world has moved well beyond pure IM and just auditing - Vantage heralds the new standard for security, management and compliance for real time and Unified Communications - giving you a vantage point, a view, visibility and control over all facets of real time and unified communications and the individual tools and capabilities in those platforms. Vantage also gives you a significant advantage - from managing OCS CAC, to controlling federation, non registered employees, logging Sametime announcements - and across the widest range of UC platforms and public IM networks which now includes Skype.

Why not take a look for yourself? - and bring your security, management and compliance for unified communications up to the new standard.

Sarah Carter, who can also be reached on old fashioned email:  scarter@facetime.com

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?

[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...

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?

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.

• 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.

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. 

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?