Weblog BOOZTER - English Edition

How are businesses losing corporate data? - Part. 3

According to the Ponemon Institute enquiry, only 24% of data loss or data breaches come from external attacks as 42% is due to errors by third party service providers and another 36% is due to lost or stolen laptops or mobile devices. This shows the necessity for intrusion protection but it may not be sufficient.

The importance of managing the information lifecycle

These figures illustrate that managing information lifecycle is crucial, whether the information be internal or shared with partners.

At HOMMES & PROCESS, we provide solutions that enable businesses to easily manage information within cross-organizations projects.

Cross-organization projects can be led using common tools, sharing common practices and security policies. This kind of infrastructure can be set up by a trusted third party that will enable team data sets in a “neutral” environment which reduces the risk of data loss and guaranteeing the integrity of the data for each participant.

How to evaluate the value of the organization’s data? - Part. 2

A financial evaluation of company data as assets is a difficult task which can be quite subjective. It is necessary to:

1. Enlarge evaluation criteria
2. Remain as objective as possible

The most usual criteria chosen to evaluate risks and manage data loss, stolen data or unexpected leak of confidential information are:

• Impact on the corporate image
• Loss of customer confidence
• The additional costs to recover customer confidence and orders after a crisis
• The cost of customer notification
• The costs of updating and improving the information system 

For instance the average cost of data breach in the US has been evaluated at $ 6.75 million in 2009 according to an enquiry by the Ponemon Institute.

At HOMMES & PROCESS, the communication and collaboration solutions we provide always meet both productivity and security requirements.

The cost of data loss for businesses - Part. 1

Data protection is still not a top priority for too many businesses.  Whereas the cost of data loss in reality can be huge.

Classify data to take more advantage of it

First prerequisite is to evaluate the value of data. This classification can be done using three main groups depending on the importance of data for the business.

• White data or non critical data: all public information published or not.
• Grey data or medium critical data: all internal use information that can be accessed by everyone within the organization
• Black data or strategic data: all confidential data that can be accessed by a privileged few.

Once this first evaluation has been made, you will be able to determine the value of your organization’s data.  After which you can assign a level of protection to secure this data.

How to manage your information life cycle and protection with standard tools

The easiest way for an organization to protect data is to use solutions that naturally enable compartmentalizing data during their life cycle from creation to archiving.
Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 and Office Groove 2007 are teamwork solutions that enable information sharing while ensuring compartmentalization and securing data between team members. Allowing only those members who are explicitly entitled to access this data set.

In the next issue, we will see how to associate a value to data. 

 

 

Software Asset Management helps you cut costs and gain productivity

HOMMES & PROCESS can help you analyze and rationalize your software assets. At HOMMES & PROCESS, we have been certified by Microsoft for license delivery for small and medium businesses as well as for large organizations. We are pleased to announce that we have recently attained the Software Asset Management Competency.

Is it really worth maintaining a software asset management program within your organization?

There are multiple ways to buy hardware and software in an organization: OEM licenses (Original Equipment Manufacturer, when licenses are bought pre-installed with the computers), through FPP (full packaged product) and through volume licensing programs. The various purchasing channels can make it complicated to maintain a proper inventory. Different versions of the same software, for instance Office Word, can lead to compatibility problems and prevent people from efficiently working on a single document.

Initiating and maintaining a software asset management program can help organizations:

• Optimize software purchasing  and cut  costs
• Gain productivity by standardizing usages throughout the organization
• Secure software usage compliance

At HOMMES & PROCESS, we include the SAM (Software Asset Management) competency as part of our overall solutions to help our customers be more agile. Question about SAM? Do not hesitate to contact us to learn more.

Behind the Cloud

Cloud Computing is a concept that has been familiar to IT experts for a couple of years.

What is Cloud Computing?

It may be confusing to a less informed public to understand what is behind Cloud Computing. Indeed, it is quite simple, once experts’ language has been translated, Cloud Computing is a new way to consume software applications: consumption is on demand, you no longer need to buy full software licenses of your favorite desktop application for instance, server licenses and infrastructure. No need either to worry about files and data storage; they are also hosted in the Cloud. Cloud Computing helps cut costs such as ownership costs, IT resources, infrastructure management... it really seems to be a bargain!

As a matter of fact, main software providers, Microsoft, Google and IBM, have their own specific offer in the Cloud. According to Forrester, demand remains low, only 3% of enterprise customers and 4% of small and medium businesses have implemented solutions hosted into the Cloud. It seems that the model has not sufficiently taken into account the need to secure and manage corporate information. Then, it becomes clear that before having corporate data and know-how hosted in huge data centers in the Cloud, organizations must be given some guarantee about security and confidentiality. Among the frequently asked questions: where is my data? Is it stored next to my competitors’ data? Who is having access to my data? When dealing with risk management, those are rightful questions.

Is there a way to benefit from the advantages of the Cloud Computing without compromising strategic corporate information?

Are there other options available? Briefly, is it possible to externalize all or a portion of the information system with security and confidentiality guaranteed? The solution must include guarantees regarding the place where data are stored, how data from different organizations are separated and who is responsible for the infrastructure management.  At HOMMES & PROCESS, we understand that organizations’ know-how and intellectual property needs to be protected. Our customers’ data protection has always been one of our top priorities, we have always acted as a trusted third party for our customers. We provide overall solutions based upon our expertise that help our customers concentrate on their business. We succeed when our customers succeed.

New Year’s Resolution number one: empower my emails

According to a Forrester study called “Building the future of collaboration” from october 2009, email is and remains the first and foremost collaboration tool for professionals (77% of users), far beyond collaborative platforms and other web 2.0 tools such as wikis, forums etc..

At the same time a strong need for distant collaboration across boundaries within organizations (80 % of users) and outside of the company with partners (67 % of the users) appears.

Email collaboration shows its limits: confusion in file management, difficulties in reaching correspondents or in having timely answers, making it difficult collaborate efficiently. Nevertheless, users do not want to change their habits, they are asking for improvements.

The conclusion of all this is that email is not the optimal tool to structure and speed collaboration, nor does it enable the capitalization of know how and value created by users because information shared through emails can be confusing and their diffusion uncontrolled. 60 % of the panel point at those disadvantages.

It does not mean that email is useless in a professional environment; it reveals professionals are conscious of the weaknesses and are looking for solutions that will eliminate them while continuing working with their favorite tool.

At HOMMES & PROCESS, we do work with email every day, to structure and accelerate collaboration,  we use SharePoint Workspace 2010 (Office Groove 2007); it enables us to work closely with our teams, customers and partners across the world without geographical or time boundaries. The link between email and SharePoint Workspace 2010 (Groove) occurs simply and intuitively with GrooveIT! for Microsoft Outlook, a tool that enables sending emails and all attachments to shared workspaces avoiding to lose information or misuse. We gain time and efficiency which helps us increase customer satisfaction.

Long term, SharePoint Workspace 2010 integration with SharePoint enables intellectual property protection and capitalizes the company’s know how. This can be made easier by using Workspace Dashboard, a single place to manage centrally SharePoint Workspace 2010 workspaces life cycle and long term repository within SharePoint.

In 2010 empower your emails, collaborate in an easy and efficient way!

How can organizational and technical innovation help to get out the crisis?

Whereas economists and governments are trying to forecast when and how will the current crisis end, at     HOMMES & PROCESS we propose solutions, a sum of both organizational and technical innovations, which help organizations improve their competitiveness during those hard times and get ready when better times are back.

Which are the expected scenarios to get out of the crisis?

Economists differentiate three possible scenarii to get out crisis:

• The "V" Scenario: Growth is back immediately after the depression

• The “U” Scenario”: Recession lasts longer than in the “V” scenario but growth begins immediately afterwards
• The “W” Scenario: recession periods are followed up by short growth periods that are too weak to last.

Recently, several economists warned that we must remain careful, that the crisis might not be finished. According to OCDE and the IMF, growth may remain negative until the end of 2009.

Is it worth investing in innovation during down times?

Innovation is one of the key to stay ahead and prepare for the future, when it creates real value. However decision-makers ask themselves:

“how do I do to invest in innovative solutions when jobs are in danger?”

At the same time, some values and principles such as trust, responsibility and team spirit become top priorities. These core values must be taken into consideration within the organization but also in the relationships with external organizations (customers, partners, co-contractors etc.).

To improve competitiveness, organizations must define their own strategy first, then have their employees committed to the corporate strategy.

 

At HOMMES & PROCESS, besides helping organizations implement new technologies, we can help with change management for a smooth transition period and successful human implementation of new teamwork methods.

Customer experience with Microsoft Office Groove and GrooveIT!

Here are a few things our customers and partners had to say about Groove and GrooveIT!:

About Microsoft Office Groove

You really have made an impact on my company... We are using Groove on a daily basis and I have even now stopped to keep files in folders outside Groove, if it is not in Groove, it is not anywhere...

Petri I. Salonen, Founder, CEO at TELLUS International - USA
Global President at International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP)

Groove has become a must-have in our daily work. It has enabled us to improve our organization and business processes:  enabling working from home and drastically cutting costs.

Joëlle ANDRE, Real estate manager - Immo - Le Jardin des Roses - France

I am a pleased and enthusiastic user. Groove is a highly intuitive tool that provides a wealth of features that I quickly appropriated. I even use it personally, in my private life. In short, we chose this solution as much for the tool as for the HOMMES & PROCESS services>. This makes for rapid and efficient collaboration, characteristic of HOMMES & PROCESS.

Jean-Marc BONDON, Senior Consultant at Défense Conseil International - France

About GrooveIT!

A real pleasure, I create my PowerPoint presentations, click on the “save to Groove” button in the ribbon, choose the destination workspace, the files tool, I’m done. GrooveIT! for My Documents: A MUST!

Loïzic MAREAU, Senior Manager at PEP 35 – Nonprofit medico-social organization - France

GrooveIT rocks!!! Files and agenda sharing between Office and Groove!!!!

Huub KNOPS, Portfoliomanager Cloud Integration Consulting at Getronics Consulting – Nederland

The ability to easily pool emails from my Outlook inbox to Groove discussion tools represents a substantial advantage.

Jean-Mathieu DE RIGAUD, Managing Director at Nordaq Water Filter System - France

Right click ability to send emails, etc over to the workspaces.  For the Calendars, being able to put items into users team’s and groove calendars is extremely helpful.

Bruce Hagan, Quality Assurance & License Compliance Director at BDO Seidman - USA

We thank them all for their ongoing support. Leave us your own comments

Is the 2009 flu pandemic a threat for business?

On 11 June 2009, a new strain of H1N1 influenza was declared to be a global pandemic (Stage 6) by the World Health Organization after evidence of spreading in the southern hemisphere. Certain scholars and senior policy advisors argue that pandemic influenza represents a substantive threat to the international economy, to each nation's national security, and a challenge to international governance.

According to the latest evaluations, H1N1 influenza may affect between 20% and 40 % of the population in the coming months.

Most of the time, the virus is harmless, it only requires people to stay at home for one week to 10 days. Nevertheless, scientists warm about possible alteration in the virus constitution.

What differentiates most the "Mexican" Influenza is that contamination is racing through the world. In only 6 weeks, it has affected more people than the "regular" winter influenza in 6 months! Summertime and population travelling around the world on holidays is accelerating the phenomenon.

Are companies and professional organizations ready to face high levels of absenteeism in the coming months?

How can business go on when a significant proportion of employees will have to stay at home?  Business Continuity Plans will need to be updated very soon to deal with to this situation.

Definition of BCP according to Wikipedia: Business continuity planning (BCP) is the creation and validation of a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical (urgent) functions within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption. The logistical plan is called a business continuity plan.
In plain language, BCP is working out how to stay in business in the event of disaster. Incidents can be local  like building fires, regional, such as earthquakes, or national, including  pandemic illnesses.

We understand that H1N1 Influenza has to be seriously taken into account. What kind of solution can be implemented:

• Have all employees been vaccinated against influenza. Even if everybody agrees, vaccines must be available. Pharmaceutical companies report that it will be available at the earliest in October and may be only in November. Meanwhile, the pandemic will continue to spread.
• Provide employees with solutions that will enable them to work from home. Organizations in a position to provide these kinds of solutions will be in a position to maintain a reasonable level of activity; while preventing the spreading of the pandemic unnecessarily.

Office Groove is typically the kind of tool that can help companies organize business continuity, enabling teams to continue working together without boundaries. Whatever the size of the organization, Office Groove alone or co-implemented with SharePoint can really help to ensure business continuity. Add GrooveIT! products to create a centralized comllaboration solution allowing employees to work from home as if they were at the Office: receive and share Outlook resources in Groove workspaces, retrieve SharePoint documents with a few clicks in one word efficiency whatever the location.

On a social point of view, enabling employees to work from home can also be seen as an advantage enabling to fulfill both business objectives and personal life. Read real life experience.

Actually, the need to search for and implement new solutions to ensure business continuity can lead to a new business organization that fits the requirements of tomorrow’s economy. We will have to adapt , move from bulk consumption to sustainable consumption: work from home not only to lower risks in the case of pandemic illness but  also to help reduce  the ecological footprint of human activities, reducing the need of: business real estate, transportation, etc.

Changing our habits is not just a matter of protecting ourselves against unexpected events such as pandemics but  can also lead to an improvement in our quality of life.

Manage "unstructured" information: a critical issue for businesses

In our everyday life, all work documents such as files, emails, discussion threads, videos, etc. that are not stored centrally, but are saved to personal areas (email boxes, hard drives, written documents, etc.), can be thought of as "unstructured" information. According to an IDC survey: "by 2010, the amount of information in the “digital universe” will approach 1 trillion gigabytes, and 85% of this will be managed by organizations. The lion’s share of this information is "unstructured" information." (Source)

Provide agile solutions to manage business (strategic) information

A prerequisite for businesses to be in a position to manage most of its information is to convert individual inputs into collectively shared data. This being said, it means that organizations need to:

• Drive their employees to consider sharing information as a natural behavior. This can be achieved through training programs addressing subjects such as change management and collaborative best practices.
• Provide the right tools that will allow everyone to easily and securely share information in a managed way. Enable online and offline collaboration with tools such as Microsoft Office Groove, SharePoint, Outlook or other collaboration tools. Make the interaction between the various tools easy for users.

For instance, Outlook emails and attachments can be easily shared within Groove collaborative workspaces using GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office Outlook or SharePoint file libraries’ content can be easily taken offline using GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office SharePoint.

Manage information life cycle to capitalize collective knowledge

A project typically begins with a lot of unstructured information that becomes more organized as the project progresses. Completed projects will be archived so that they can be found when needed again. Organizations are looking for solutions that enable them to manage information at each stage of its life cycle. Successful information management includes access management, secure information transfer using the internet, backup and archiving management throughout the entire information life cycle. Various collaboration solutions will be used during a project life cycle; people involved may work at the office, may be mobile perhaps working from home and will interact with others both from within and outside the organization.

Organizations are facing the challenge to control and manage a huge amount of data representing the work value created.  In brief, how to protect Intellectual Property assets: sum of know-how, products, concepts, etc... Actually, in an economic downturn, what organizations need most is to capitalize on their own assets, be able to face unexpected situations and adapt rapidly, mobilizing the right people at the right places. At HOMMES & PROCESS, we have always believed people must be able to work efficiently wherever they are and that organizations must be in a position to capitalize on its knowledge in a secure way. That is why our solutions are designed to fulfill both these needs.