The Hidden Business CoST: Consumerization of Sharing Tools

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EDT

Sharing files with friends has never been easier. Whether it is via old-school hard copy methods like CDs, DVDs and USB drives, nefarious peer-to-peer torrents like BitTorrent or new shared, private cloud storage services like Dropbox, getting a photo or music file from one person to another takes mere seconds. The problem is that people inside businesses aren’t using these services just to share personal files. They are circumventing secured content management systems like SharePoint in favor of consumer-friendly services in order to share files with third parties. For businesses, Consumerization of Sharing Tools (CoST) can encourage insecure file sharing and the impact can be startling. WikiLeaks was the result of a failed SharePoint deployment. The user simply circumvented the SharePoint system, downloaded extremely sensitive data and made it available to the world. Of course, not all file share abuse is intended to be destructive and the majority of businesses aren’t dealing with classified government cables or sensitive personal information. Most businesses, however, do want full visibility of some files, particularly who is accessing them and what they are doing with them.

The Cloud: Driving an IT Department Transformation

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:15:00 EDT

It can no longer be denied, brushed aside or overlooked: the cloud is here to stay. The security fears, concerns over control and service level agreements are now being addressed and overcome and the cloud has soared up the CIO’s priority list. According to IBM’s 2011 survey of 3,000 global CIOs, 60 percent of organizations are ready to make the move to cloud computing over the next five years in order to gain a competitive advantage and grow their business. This figure is almost double the number of CIOs who said the same last year. Analyst house Ovum also predicts that business spending on public cloud will hit $66 billion by 2015. What does this leap to the cloud mean for CIOs and IT departments? In short, the role of the IT professional is transforming. Dave Aron, Gartner fellow in the analyst's CIO research group, states: “Globally 67% of the IT budget is spent keeping the lights on, 19% supports growth of current business such as scaling up volume or helping the business enter new markets, only 14% is allocated to genuine transformational IT."

Latest News from Andy McLoughlin

The Hidden Business CoST: Consumerization of Sharing Tools

The Cloud: Driving an IT Department Transformation