As a senior leader, you’ve probably asked: Where is my data? How is it protected? Who has access to it?
You may also be asking yourself: What devices are my employees using to access data? Smartphones? Tablets? How do I keep data synchronized?
Ahmet Tuncay has been there. He’s in the business of making it all make sense. Tuncay is CEO of Soonr Inc., a provider of secure file sharing and collaboration services for businesses.
Exploding growth
As the market of secure file sharing and collaboration explodes with growth from the introduction of smartphones and tablet devices, the need for simple and secure file sharing has never been greater, he says.
“The biggest problem in large mobile teams is getting access to the right content at the right permission level from anywhere they are,” Tuncay says. “An example would be someone at a construction site who wants to look at a blueprint, and he might have a smartphone that is an Android or an Apple iOS tablet. The document format might not be compatible with his system.”
If a person wanted to edit an Excel spreadsheet on his iPad, he or she could open it in a different service such as Dropbox. If, however, a person wanted to edit that content, he or she would have to export it to a third-party app such as SmartOffice.
Once that happens, the content has left the local office.
“The minute you do that, your business content has left the visibility of your IT department,” Tuncay says. “The content could show up anywhere, and that is a big no-no. The compliance guys worry about that.”
The security of the document has been breached, and there is no telling where it could have been intercepted much less embedded with malware or a virus.
“Also from a productivity standpoint, it makes no sense to ask the employees to load three different things, SmartOffice, Dropbox and this and that so you can view documents,” he says.
Tuncay says there are many places you can go to shop for a file sharing service provider. The question you really have to ask, however, is if you are getting a business grade service or a consumer grade service.
“That is the first question,” he says. “If it is built for consumer grade, it is probably not going to have service license agreements or have audited and forensic and stuff offerings.”
The other question companies ask about is the mobile experience.
“Can I use one app or do I have to get five apps? How do I edit and mark up documents? How can I create content while on the move because that’s what my business requires?” Tuncay says.
“The third big area is the collaboration and sharing layer. For example, how do I share a document with somebody else outside my company and still be able to track what they did?
“It is almost unimaginable to be without a service like this now.”
