CDSA

Box’s Ellis: New Security Threats are Driving Business Changes

New security threats are one of “four major driving forces” that are changing business as we know it today, according to Katie Ellis, senior partner marketing manager at Box.

Those security threats “have the potential to impact your business” and they represent “perhaps the most significant trend affecting IT decisions today,” she said July 12 during a joint Adobe-Box webinar on employee productivity. “Everyone is more vulnerable and companies must secure and protect their most important content from these threats,” she warned.

Ellis didn’t cite any specific security threats until later in the webinar, when she discussed the management of content-centered processes. But she said another driving force changing business today is the fact that employees are working in completely new ways — including on many different types of devices. “We’re working on more devices than ever before and need to access information from anywhere on any device. People have very high expectations for standards of usability and expect that all of their applications will work on any device no matter where they are,” she said.

Ann Johnson, VP of Microsoft’s Enterprise Cybersecurity Group, recently pointed out during a Microsoft webinar that all those new devices employees are doing work on represent a major source for data security breaches.

Businesses are also “far more collaborative today” than they have traditionally been, Ellis said on the Adobe-Box webinar, adding: “We find our joint customers using Box and Adobe on a global basis, collaborating with partners, vendors, customers and contractors around the world. Employees want to collaborate with anyone inside or outside of their organization, regardless of where they are.”

Everybody, meanwhile, has heard the term “digital transformation” many times, but it’s true that is something “driving change in every single industry,” she said. “Most likely your business is facing some sort of digital disruption or transformation as a result of new technology. Companies in every industry are building new digital experiences to collaborate with and transact with their clients, customers and partners,” she said.

With all of these changes and threats, companies are “facing challenges that can impact or hinder their ability to go digital,” she said. “One area where individuals have been challenged to keep up is the management of content-centered processes,” she said, pointing out that 80% of those processes “still rely on paper and there are often many manual steps involved, adding to data sprawl and inconsistency across the entire business.” As a result, she said, it “becomes increasingly hard for employees to find … the right version of content that they should be working on, and all of these redundant and disparate systems are incredibly cumbersome and costly to manage [and] maintain its scale.” The way that employees engage in those content-centered processes is, therefore, “complicated, cumbersome, costly and, at many times, not secure,” she said.

There are more than 230 million knowledge workers around the world and they spend over 50% of their time searching for the right content and information, she went on to say. That’s a lot of time to spend on such tasks when people “need to get their work done,” she said.

Box and Adobe “have a different vision for how content processes can be managed,” she said, adding that “by going digital with the joint Box and Adobe solution, you can enable a faster time to market, drive seamless collaboration with people inside and outside your organization, all while maintaining a single source of [true documents] and keeping your content secure.”

The companies announced in April that as part of a partnership there would be three new “seamless” ways for businesses to use Box document storage and Adobe Document Cloud together. First, users could now review documents in Box and route them for electronic signatures in Adobe Sign. Second, through a new integration between Box and Acrobat Document Cloud, people could now make edits to PDFs in Box without downloading them to the desktop, and ensure all changes are automatically saved back to Box. Third, Box could be set as the default cloud service while using Acrobat Document Cloud and Acrobat Reader on a computer, iPad or iPhone. The new integration from Adobe also added a new layer of security to PDFs by taking advantage of Box features including watermarking, password protected content and access to statistics.