Siemens has enhanced its OpenScale Security Services offering to better cover critical areas around UC: business continuity, compliance, identity and privacy, threat mitigation and data security. If security is paramount for other IT applications, it should be so for unified communications, which converges a variety of corporate data and users on a single platform.
Making sure users can access their communications in an emergency (or even a simple Internet outage) ensures your company can still do business even as the network, or access to it, fails. Complying with regulatory mandates is not negotiable when it comes to e-mail today; expect not just IM, but VoIP, conferencing and social networking to follow. And of course, defining approved users and profiles around access is critical, especially as companies open their UC doors to partners and customers.
If you’re deploying IC, are you paying enough attention to security?
The iPhone3G hit stores today, but of course you knew that already. iPhone3G is the device Apple touts as “The best phone for business. Ever” boasting a few new features that business users will need. The iPhone3G is, of course, a “3G” phone meaning it can access higher speed data networks from the wireless carriers. The new iPhone also supports Microsoft Exchange putting push email, calendar and contact information at your fingertips. The iPhone3G has a VPN client, WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication for business-grade security.
Of course the other big news from Apple is the opening of the App Store and the many 3rd-party apps being made available there. I did a scan of the applications surfacing for iPhone3G paying specific attention to apps that support the Enterprise 2.0 vision. Here’s what I found:
Irecently learned of an interesting tool for schools and their students, called Web Lockers. According to the vendor, students “can use the lockers to upload homework assignments and projects, send and receive assignments, view graded work, and communicate with teachers and classmates outside of the classroom. For added collaboration, School Web Lockers also provides teacher blogs and message boards (for school-wide or even district-wide online discussions.)”
It’s Wednesday night, the big two days of the Enterprise 2.0 conference are coming to an end. I’ve blogged a ton and shot a lot of video at the conference. The overall sentiment I’m getting from all the attendees and from all the sessions I’ve attended is that enterprise 2.0 is not there yet, but it’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. Here’s a summary of the top learnings from the conference:
Young people entering the workforce communicate with Web 2.0 tools. They want more than just email.
Cloud computing is an easy way to launch a service and scale, but it’s far from being a true utility like electricity.
To innovate, you need to harness the wisdom of your network. First start with your staff and then move to partners and your audience.
When you create a collaborate Enterprise 2.0 space, TRUST your audience. Release the desire to control. Don’t control. Even the CIA recommends this.
Change management. Adoption requires evangelism and constant reminders and associating Web 2.0 tools with everything you’re doing.
Don’t just deploy social media for the sake of deploying social media. Develop a strategic business rationale.
There are tons of companies that offer business social networking solutions. Some are trying to offer everything, and some are just trying to solve a single problem.
Allow people to engage with your company outside of your .com business address. Let them engage with your brand where they already like to go, like Facebook, MySpace, etc.
And here’s a summary of all my coverage from the event. It’s a total of 23 posts of which seven include video. Enjoy. :)
I spoke to Peter Biddle of Trampoline Systems, also formerly an encryption expert and creator of BitLocker. We were having a great discussion about cloud computing and why some people don’t encrypt their data. Unfortunately, I wasn’t recording anything, so I turned on the camera and asked him what’s it going to take for everyone to start using encryption ubiquitously. His simple answer, “It’s not easy.”
Having trouble trying to sell in Web 2.0-style collaboration to the higher ups in your enterprise organization? Are there VPs and CXOs that are shying away from wiki-style knowledge management because they don’t get it or they fear confidential information will be passed carelessly among employees and partners? Do they feel that the information is too sensitive, that it might get into the wrong hands?
Whatever information they have, no matter how sensitive, it’s definitely not as critical or as classified as the CIA. Tell your boss, “If the CIA can collaborate with Web 2.0 tools, so can we.”
Sean Dennehy and Don Burke are two CIA employees who are also leading advocates for the Intellipedia, a Web 2.0 collaboration environment created by the Department of National Intelligence (DNI) for the intelligence community.
During their presentation, “From the bottom up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community,” Dennehy and Burke spoke about the difficulty of convincing the country’s most secretive organization to share information using Web 2.0 collaboration tools. After their presentation, I asked them on video (after we received clearance from the public affairs office) to discuss the difficulty of selling in the collaboration platform, the need for the CIA to share information at critical moments with other intelligence gathering organizations, and how their greatest detractors have become their most enthusiastic users. Enjoy the six minute interview.
Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA showed off the structure of Intellipedia which is foremost a wiki for the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA was the pilot customer for Intellipedia and Burke and Dennehy are two of its leading advocates.
Intellipedia is a closed knowledge management system with three levels of access ranging from top secret, to secret, to sensitive but unclassified. But beyond just a wiki, Intellipedia has also become the brand name for a suite of other common Web 2.0 tools such as bookmarking and video. No need for me to go on and on explaining it. Dennehy and Burke posted all the information (and more) explaining it on the Enterprise 2.0 community site.
It wasn’t easy for them. Some saw their desire to create an intelligence information and social network as traitorous. Luckily, they were able to show that a government intelligence community with a wiki was possible for the intelligence community and its partners to answer the burning question of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”
It’s the opening day here at Web2.0Expo and the event is off to a great start. Today I sat in on a session that dealt with identity, data portability and privacy for web-based applications. The session focused largely around OpenID and OAuth, two efforts underway to bring standardizaton and greater simplicity to these challenging issues. The big takaway for me was that if we think dealing with these issues is tricky in the consumer web, it’s nothing compared with the challenges businesses will face in this area.
The first part of this New York Times article paints an alarming picture of the realities of growing security vulnerabilities in business. In part, those vulnerabilities are the doors left open as employees download and run applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing and instant messaging. But the main issue this article raises is that users are circumventing IT to use applications like Google Docs and Google Desktop to do their jobs more effectively. This is keeping IT and security experts awake at night, worrying about what information is making its way out of the corporate firewall and creating a potentially dangerous situation. Continue Reading »
Arecent survey by Harris Interactive has found that 59% of Americans don’t feel comfortable having commercial web sites using their personal information to target ads and other content toward them. This, depite the fact that such targeting presumably helps users, making the content they see more relevant and more interesting.
The numbers didn’t improve significantly with the possibility of enhanced security and privacy regulations, although more people did say they were “somewhat comfortable” with the concept, if not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. I think these privacy concerns go beyond clear-cut worries about what companies will do with personal information (say, sell it to others, or leave it exposed to fraud or other criminal behavior), and speak to a less concrete but more ingrained fear of revelation; most Americans just don’t want to share all that much about themselves with strangers. Continue Reading »
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Oct 22nd, 2008 |
It’s Wednesday night, the big two days of the Enterprise 2.0 conference are coming to an end. I’ve blogged a ton and shot a lot of video at the conference. The overall sentiment I’m getting from all the attendees and from all the sessions I’ve attended is that enterprise 2.0 is not there yet, but it’s going to happen, it’s inevitable. Here’s a summary of the top learnings from the conference:
Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the 
It wasn’t easy for them. Some saw their desire to create an intelligence information and social network as traitorous. Luckily, they were able to show that a government intelligence community with a wiki was possible for the intelligence community and its partners to answer the burning question of “What did you know, and when did you know it?”
