As business moves at an increasingly quick pace, our communication requirements are growing and getting more complex.  We are conducting business before we even step into the office, and more often than not - well after our day is complete. Whether it’s through email, a handheld device or SMS, we send out more messages and information than ever before. While the convenience of these tools has quickly made them every day necessities, the need for secure communications represents a challenge for executives, managers and consultants.

Daily headlines illustrate the need for a secure business communications solution. Whether it’s a compromised FTP application that has been hacked by malware or an email message that has leaked confidential or sensitive business information, the lack of security at some of the biggest organizations in the world has many companies struggling to regain their reputation and consumer confidence.

The security risks are everywhere. Whether you work in the data center and use FTP or you are an end user sending an email with confidential financial data, the risk of a data breach or information being compromised is the same.  From a data breach perspective, more often than not, the cause of insecure data exchange is caused by outdated legacy or homegrown applications and disparate systems that cannot be centrally managed or use clear text message exchange without encryption and minimal security controls.

Without this central management, there is no end-to-end, top-to-bottom visibility in your files transfers. Many organizations aren’t even aware of the all the file transfers that are processed within their data centers or if a file transfer has failed until it is too late.

Productivity Needs Drives Risk

Many companies face security concerns because content and messaging requirements are not a corporate initiative or they have too many tools that don’t meet the needs of the business user. Because of this, end users are using whatever tools they find easy to use to send information, regardless of the confidentiality of the message or file being sent. These tools are not managed by IT, but are merely used “to get the job done.” With these unmanaged solutions being used by virtually every end user, how do you track what information your users are sending and how?

Many of the secure communications tools are too complex for the typical end user. If IT becomes involved to send business information on a daily basis, the user loses productivity by having to stop their daily business routine. For a secure business communications solution to be adopted and embraced by both internal and external users company-wide, it should be intuitive to the user.

Mobile applications such as the iPhone and BlackBerry present a different challenge. How many emails do you respond to on your mobile app, whether you are in the office or not? Convenient? Yes. Secure? No. The need is now for a secure business communications solutions that can fill all these holes: the data center, replacing insecure file transfer methods such as FTP and a secure mobile app.

Organizations need the management in place to ensure the secure file transfer is handled from all angles, whether enterprise, ad-hoc or mobile.  Central management of all data transfer enables companies to improve operations and increase its security.  More importantly, your company doesn’t become another data breach statistic or headline.

Jon Gatrell is the Vice President of Product Management at Stonebranch.  As vice president of product management, he is responsible for driving product strategy including new solution development and enhancement of existing products to meet market needs and demand.  Jon is a published author and maintains an active blog on best practices in product management and marketing, www.spatiallyrelevant.org.  Prior to joining Stonebranch, Jon held leadership roles in corporate strategy, product management and marketing.

For more information on Stonebranch, please visit www.stonebranch.com