Collaboration is an inevitability which should be accommodated for within business

Survey results from the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) recently revealed that workers often use products like Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive, in order to collaborate with external partners, even though they are banned by many organisations. With employees resorting to unapproved collaboration tools in order to work effectively, Outsourcery suggests that attention be placed on the development and implementation of secure collaboration technologies suitable for business use.

Piers Linney, Co-CEO at Cloud Service Provider Outsourcery says: “As cloud solutions become a part of everyday life, it’s inevitable that employees will begin to use the consumer-grade file-share tools that they recognise to ease business processes if there aren’t suitable alternatives available, even if they aren’t the most effective or secure for business use.

Results from the AIIM survey showed that; 89 per cent of survey respondents stated that a formal collaboration system is a vital component of infrastructure; 71 per cent stated that they felt that that their organisation had shortfalls in technical support for collaboration; and 40 per cent felt strongly that in their organisation, collaboration is poorly supported.

“This trend towards the adoption of ‘less secure’ collaboration technologies in the workplace is likely to keep growing unless business grade alternatives are developed and implemented by IT teams.

Linney continues: “Shadow IT is slowly but surely becoming an issue within businesses and people are now increasingly self-provisioning in the workplace. In a recent Frost and Sullivan survey, 80 per cent of respondents admitted to using non-approved SaaS applications in their jobs, and we predict that this number will increase in coming years. This risk can be mitigated if IT departments stay one step ahead, providing secure tools before workers look for them themselves.
Outsourcery offers both secure and cost effective cloud-based Microsoft collaboration tools, such as SharePoint and Lync, to enable employees to collaborate, and share documents and information within a business, as well as externally. These solutions are delivered through Outsourcery’s partner network so customers have access to reliable tools from the offset.

“The responsibility to provide these solutions to workers should be felt at all levels of the channel, from the service providers who look to create collaboration solutions, to the resellers who look to solve collaboration issues for their customers, and the senior decision makers in business, who aim to get the best out of their employees. In order for collaboration to continue to grow and be used effectively, steps need to be taken now by all parties involved,” Linney concludes.