A new service from Intralinks, named Connect, marks a different variation on an increasingly common theme with the Cloud – a trend towards the egalitarian re-distribution of resources and capabilities. When it comes to collaborative communications management, Connect now makes available to a far-wider range of users a capability that was the preserve of large organisations and enterprises conducting serious, high security, high-ticket-value communications.
Intralinks has built up its core business by providing high security inter-enterprise collaboration through the provision of high integrity document communication. Companies working in areas such as loan syndication management, merger and acquisition management, or the life sciences, have a need for secure forms of collaboration, with most of it in the form of documents.
As Intralinks’ Chief Technology Officer, John Landy, observed, these are businesses which have recognised that the end result is more important than the cost of achieving it. That, however, is now being seen as a much more wide requirement.
So the launch of Connect, which Landy acknowledges is at heart a re-branding of Intralinks’ core document collaboration capabilities, is the company’s response to being asked to play a key role in across-the-board Communications Policy Management. It can be fully integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, creating an environment where documents can be identified and prioritised. It can then implement the communications policies set up by the user, with those documents given a high security priority – typically sensitive documents transmitted between business partners outside the firewall - managed and delivered by Intralinks while the lower priority documents are transmitted via Exchange.
The ability to prioritise and classify documents is a policy management capability that should have increasing resonance with enterprises of all types and sizes, particularly in the wake of the MegaUploads court action and the growing trend towards staff implementing a `bring your own client’ model.
The fall-out from the closure of file-sharing operation, MegaUploads, coupled with the court action now underway against the company, has spilled over into the corporate world. The growth of the `bring your own’ model, where company staff use their own laptops as their work tools, has created an environment where staff can mix work and personal activities a little more thoroughly than they might have imagined.
As a growing number of corporate IT departments are now accommodating this approach, it also means that it can become possible for staff to use company IT resources for personal tasks without realising. If some of those personal tasks have included file-sharing the chances of the enterprise becoming embroiled grows in inverse ratio to the chances of clearly separating the work and personal activities of individual staff members.
The Intralinks solution to this is the ability to manage corporate side of this equation as a SaaS `container’ where the user’s laptop is essentially just a portal onto the datacentre, where the work is performed. This not only protects corporate data of accidental corruption and loss, but also clearly delineates between every corporate and personal activity the user undertakes.
