nuBLOG

Conundrum – My company wants me to share more data and at the same time secure more data!

Gary Palgon
Vice President, Product Management
nuBridges

CIOs everywhere are being told by the business that they need to share more data, both internally and with business partners.  And then they are being told to secure more data to limit its use to only authorized users. 

Retailers, like many other industries, have been battling this during the past few years as they strive to comply with the PCI Data Security Standard to protect credit card information but the battle is only getting more complex.  Key to many organizations is their customer information, often part of loyalty and/or credit programs which require them to store for future use information considered to be personally identifiable information or PII. 

In a recent article by Walt Conway about what he heard at last week’s National Retail Federation (NRF) conference, he noted “While in New York, I heard a lot of CIOs talk about balancing the pressure to open systems and databases to more internal users with the need to protect the data. This balancing act will get more interesting as the volume of customer data expands.”  This is exactly the dilemma I hear all of the time.

And while that’s from a retail perspective, it’s no different in Healthcare.  Look at the US Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) which as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) has a goal to implement electronic medical records (EMR), secure protected health information (PHI) and share patient data security through out the ‘medical supply chain’.  Once again, the theme mirrors that above, share the electronic data but also secure it.

There are no silver bullet answers here, but it is important to take a strategic look at how PCI, PII and PHI is created, used, shared, archived and destroyed in order to properly ensure it is only used by authorized individuals, secure at all times and destroyed when it is no longer needed. 

What are the challenges related to locking down data and sharing more data in your organization?

Until next time,

Gary

PS...Later this week, nuBridges is releasing a new White Paper, "The Power of Integrated Protection."    This White Paper explores the emerging issues that are driving enterprises to seek an enterprise-class encryption, tokenization, key management and compliance solution to protect sensitive PCI, PII and PHI data.   I am offering early access to my loyal blog readers.  Click here to download the new White Paper, "The Power of Integrated Protection."   

Retailers See an Encouraging Start to Holiday Shopping Season

Kyle Parris
Director of Product Management
nuBridges

November 30th was the strongest Cyber Monday since the term was coined five years ago, matching the heaviest online spending day on record – December 9, 2008. And ShopperTrak reports that bricks-and-mortar retailers had a 1.6% increase in sales over last year during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

While we’re all keeping an eye on holiday sales (they are, after all, one indication of how our economy is or isn’t recovering from recent woes), many retailers are taking a longer view. Beyond just short-term revenue numbers to longer-term strategic goals of cutting costs, streamlining back-office operations and improving their brand. These savvy retailers are adopting a number of best-in-class technologies to make their strategic goals a reality. Among them – managed file transfer solutions (MFT).

Here are a handful of real-world examples of how retailers are reaping the rewards of MFT:

• “We’ve eliminated any risk associated with the transfer of credit card data to our processer. And we’re now in compliance with the PCI DSS -- our latest audit was a piece of cake.”
• “Previously two people had to spend more than six hours each per day manually transferring customer orders from our web site and telephone orders. Our business volume has grown, and so has our workload. With our new managed file transfer solution, it takes about five minutes a day. We’re spending more time selling, less time chasing down customer orders.”
• “We use it to manage the exchange of electronic files between more than 1,000 retail outlets and our corporate order processing and accounting systems.”
• “We’re now able to meet the file exchange requirements for our retailer network without having to change our business processes. Now we’re extending our MFT solution into our global supplier community.”
• “MFT provides us with a simple, straightforward, secure file transfer solution, one that we put on auto-pilot to automatically transfer financial transactions between our back office applications in different banks on a daily basis.”

We’d love to hear how you’re retail business is doing this holiday season!

Happy holidays!

Kyle

Retailers are Gaining Business Value with MFT

Kyle Parris
Director of Product Management
nuBridges

As retailers wait out the holiday shopping numbers, they’re continuing to enjoy lots of business value from their managed file transfer solutions. Retailers are early adopters of MFT for numerous reasons, but the top two are the need to:

• Exchange exploding volumes of information – online catalogs, product images, price quotes, invoices and so forth; and
• Comply (and prove compliance) with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

The new generation of MFT solutions meets these challenges and many more. Other benefits that retailers tell us they’re reaping include:

• Streamlined global order and fulfillment
• Improved order-to-cash and days-sales-outstanding
• Enhanced competitive sourcing capabilities
• Improved demand forecasting
• Eliminated order and invoice errors
• Reduced costs and headaches associated with PCI DSS compliance
• Met audit and governance requirements
• Reduced transaction costs
• Improved customer loyalty

Until next week,

Kyle