Responding to the growing trend of data being created, consumed and stored on mobile devices that are not controlled by IT, Soonr, a leader in secure business cloud services that transforms tablets like the iPad into business productivity tools, today announced Soonr Enterprise to help solve the mobile enterprise challenges large organizations are facing.
“Soonr is helping our global sales organization fully exploit the power of its smart devices – transforming its tablets and smartphones into reliable alternatives to carrying a laptop,” said Al Lounsbury, director of Digital Tools, Corporate Marketing at Ciena. “They can access core content to do business – whether they are documents, presentations or videos – and work on them seamlessly and securely within the cloud infrastructure.”
Soonr Enterprise builds upon its existing enterprise grade infrastructure and services that have been in continuous operation since 2005, now serving over 120,000 businesses globally.
Business units and Teams want easy access to content across mobile devices, while their IT counterparts want to ensure that access to sensitive information is secured and controlled according to corporate policies. IT professionals have genuine concerns about the extreme security risks of unmanaged cloud services and are issuing legitimate warnings about a lack of controls, capabilities, reporting and integration. Even so, business units are being rapidly drawn to what tablets and mobile devices can give them – agility, ubiquity and simplicity.
“IT needs to provide corporately endorsed solutions that are easy for individuals to use, but provide IT with security, control and accountability,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “With the Consumerization and mobilization trends, IT has some real interesting challenges with data and compliance issues on end-user mobile devices. IT needs vendors like Soonr to help address these data access and collaboration challenges in the enterprise because they are not going away.”
Soonr understands the complexity of security and compliance issues facing today’s IT departments and their requirements for managing cloud services. Soonr’s services run over a purpose-built, enterprise-grade infrastructure that relies on geo-redundant data centers in major regions that delivers better than 99.9 percent uptime with industry-leading response and service restoral time guarantees. Security of customer information is assured with 256-bit AES encryption of data in transit and storage with dynamic key rotation, virus scanning, and firewalls against hacking attacks. Role-based access controls, password protection and expiration timers for share links, and inactivity session timers deliver best-in-class user security. Finally, encryption of all local session information and non-persistent use of login credentials provide critical protection against lost or stolen devices.
“It’s an issue that every large organization has to come to grips with – and it is not an easy one,” said Martin Frid-Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Soonr. “But we’ve come up with a solution that helps CIOs and their IT departments to navigate the divide between security and ingenuity. The last thing you want to do is hold your company back from effective sale approaches – and the modern ways of doing business – because of fear.”
The new capabilities being announced today are designed to expand the level of control enterprise IT is able to exert over users, devices and the documents that are part of the cloud collaboration environment under IT management. These include the ability to create and manage Groups from global team lists with custom share permissions, which reflects how Projects are actually managed in large companies. Both users and Groups may now be imported from enterprise Active Directory databases so that adding individuals to Projects with the right permissions is fully automated, saving time and reducing mistakes when multiple systems have to be configured.
New Policy Management capabilities allow the enterprise IT Admin to access all Projects users may have created with the ability to view, search, edit and delete Projects, as well as to control how Projects are shared with other employees or external parties. These new controls enable businesses to be in compliance with industry regulations or lawful access requirements.
Advanced reports and audit trails about user, group, device, and Project-related activities provide a rich set of tools that can be used for business analytics, such as determining how Projects and documents are being used, or for diagnostic, compliance, or security purposes.
