Recently, photo messaging service Snapchat settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over issues around misrepresentation of its privacy policy, agreeing to maintain a privacy program monitored by an independent privacy professional for 20 years. This is a serious move that shows the increased impact data privacy has in the technology landscape.
While this is a black eye for Snapchat, there are many companies that are looking to avoid facing these kinds of repercussions. Recently, I’ve heard about large enterprise customers beginning to shut down collaboration platforms due to “social outages”.
After the initial euphoria of deploying social solutions and experiencing certain level of benefits in connecting employees and encourage innovation, the concerns around data governance and compliance of these quick-moving social collaboration tools are now coming into the spotlight. Since companies don’t seem to have a good way today to address these concerns, we are seeing more businesses willing to sit on the sidelines of enterprise social adoption for the time being to wait out for this market segment to mature on a product and cost/benefit level.
This is where we at AvePoint are able to help enterprises worldwide, especially with our data governance and compliance solutions that span across where people work – whether it’s on desktops, laptops, tablets, or on their mobile phones.
We’ve seen this message resonate at industry conferences around the globe – including security and privacy events in Singapore and the UK, European SharePoint Conference, SPTechCon, and Microsoft TechEd North America. Enterprises want to use the latest and greatest technology to not only to improve the way they work, but also in a way that instills confidence that these environments are well governed, taking data privacy and security into account.
Additionally, we’ve already witnessed a great surge of interest in AvePoint Privacy Impact Assessment System (APIA), a free tool that is exclusively distributed by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to help companies automate the process of evaluating, assessing, and reporting on the privacy implications of their IT systems. Since we first launched at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in March, we have more than 1,300 practitioners across 57 industries and 62 countries using APIA.
We also had a busy month releasing new and updated products that are primed to broaden AvePoint’s solution coverage to help organizations better enable enterprise collaboration, including:
- Compliance Guardian Online: Running on Microsoft Azure, Compliance Guardian Online brings information governance to the cloud, ensuring that web applications, websites, and cloud platforms offer content and information securely and within organizational guidelines to minimize risk of privacy violations, malicious threats, or unintended data leakage.
- Perimeter: Organizations now have a robust mobile content management solution to mobilize their workforce by offering access to Microsoft SharePoint content from virtually any device – including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops – without sacrificing security.
- DocAve 6 SP 4: The latest version of our flagship solution offers enhanced features for SharePoint governance and compliance as well as new capabilities for migration and disaster recovery, offering a complete data management solution.
- Pipeline & Timeline: Our apps for Microsoft Dynamics CRM have expanded capabilities to further tailor Dynamics CRM to suit their organizational roles, structure, and business requirements – all from their tablet or mobile phone of choice – in order to improve sales team productivity on the go.
In this fast-growing enterprise collaboration and social market, it’s becoming more evident than ever that data governance and compliance are key to assuring innovation while maintaining basic safeguards on data security. Our steady stream of new and enhanced products speak to this reality: We will continue to add features that speak to enabling collaboration wherever it takes place – be it in the cloud, mobile devices, laptops, standard desktops, and more – while accounting for strong management, data governance, and compliance.
