Linoma Software, a leading provider of data automation and encryption technologies, today announced that Linoma has achieved Gold Certified Microsoft Partner status with competencies as an ISV – independent software vendor.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Linoma Software has demonstrated expertise with Microsoft technologies and has proven its ability to meet customers’ needs. “The certification assures customers that we have the technical knowledge to run and support applications on the Windows operating system,” said Bob Luebbe, Chief Architect for Linoma Software. “The benefits provided through our Gold Certified Partner status will allow us to continue to enhance our solutions and exceed our customers’ growing needs.”

Microsoft Gold Certified Partners represent the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and work in the closest relationships with Microsoft.  Only partners which demonstrate exceptional performance levels when delivering solutions that integrate with Microsoft technologies, and have a proven ability to meet customers’ needs, are granted Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status. By achieving this status, Linoma Software now has access to specialized training and support from Microsoft, offering a competitive advantage to our clients.

OMAHA, NE – August 9, 2010 — Linoma Software, a provider of innovative solutions for securing and transferring sensitive data, today announced GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services have completed testing and validation to receive VMware Ready certification. GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services are currently the only secure managed file transfer solutions that are VMware Ready certified for virtualized environments.

The VMware certification process requires ISV Partners to implement a full VMware environment and create test logs using VMware’s testing application. After VMware’s careful review, they authorize the application as VMware Ready.

VMware virtualization is trusted by over 190,000 customers for its proven system management and reliability. The goal of server virtualization is to consolidate physical servers – saving power and other infrastructure related costs. “We initiated the certification process for GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services with VMware to ensure all file transfers and data translation will remain secure within an Enterprise’s private cloud or virtualized environment,” says Dirk Zwart, Director of Technology Alliances at Linoma Software.

“Virtualization doesn’t fit the traditional mold of dedicated servers to handle a corporation’s encryption of sensitive data, secure data transfer or data translation functions,” says Bob Luebbe, Chief Architect at Linoma Software. “There were many variables to consider, but we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to implement a full VMware environment. The hosts and virtual servers were easy to manage and move around.”

“GoAnywhere is an ideal secure managed file transfer solution for companies using virtualized servers,” says Bob Luebbe. “It works with most platforms and provides businesses a secure environment to connect with customers and trading partners.”

Linoma Software tests its software for interoperability with Enterprise-level operating systems – SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, i5/OS, Windows, Mac OS X; popular browsers, and compliance with commercial and federal regulations like PCI, HIPAA, and SOX. “Partnering with VMware provides our customers with confidence that they are supported regardless of their configuration,” concludes Dirk Zwart.

Do insurance companies maintain Data Security Breach Insurance?

On June 23, 2010 more than 200,000 Anthem Blue Cross customers received letters informing them that their personal information might have been accessed during a security breach of the company’s website. Customers who had pending insurance applications in the system are currently being contacted because information was viewed through an on-line tool that allows users to track the status of their application. Social Security and credit card numbers were potentially viewed.  It’s one more tumble in a cascade of security breaches that can have terrible consequences for the customers and clients of such a large insurance company.

And of course, this raises an ironic question: Do insurance companies maintain their own liability insurance in the event that their information systems are compromised?  As absurd as it may seem at first glance, it’s really not a laughing matter. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a security breach is now exceeding $200 per client record.  This would mean that Anthem Blue Cross’s breach last month created a liability as great as $40M.

Moreover, there’s a ripple effect to organizations that do business with insurance companies that suffer such an information security breach.  Each Personnel Department that delivers private employee information to an outside service supplier has an inherent responsibility and liability to its employees.

We all know that the privacy information transferred between companies should use a secure and confidential method of transmission.  Yet too many small and medium-sized companies are still using simple FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software that has been proven to be susceptible to the threats of network hackers.  And by the time these organizations realize their vulnerability, it’s often too late.  These companies are often performing these FTP transfers below the radar of their IT departments.  How does it happen?

Often personnel data is off-loaded to PCs from the main information systems where it is left “in the open” on the hard drives of desktops or laptops. After the data is transferred this residual data is often unprotected, where it’s subject to theft or secondary security flaws. Insurance agents – whose jobs are to facilitate the processing of the data with their insurance providers – can also suffer from such breaches. The loss of an agent’s laptop – through theft, accident, or routine use of USB thumb-drives – poses additional liability.

There are two readily available strategies to help prevent these kinds of security abuses. The first strategy is to use data encryption technologies that not only encrypt the data, but also record into a secure log detailing when, where, and by whom the sensitive data has moved from the main information database.  Linoma’s CryptoComplete offers precisely this kind of encryption capability, and it should be examined by IT professionals as a viable, highly configurable resource for the protection of the company’s information assets.

The second strategy is to use a secure method of transfer for the data itself, ensuring that the information is never left in a vulnerable state on an individual’s personal computer.  By removing FTP access to the data by any employee’s PC and channeling the transfer through the secure corporate server, IT can prevent the problem of network hacking from occurring.  Linoma’s GoAnywhere Director solution is precisely the means of achieving the goal of a secure FTP transfer between companies.

The tragedy of the Anthem Blue Cross breach was the result of a faulty security scheme in the design of its customer service solution.  But it is not the only potential failure of data security that can impact its customers and business partners. And, unfortunately, this information security breach is just one of the 356 million reported breaches that have occurred in the US over the last five years.

So who insures the insurer when a data security breach occurs?  The real answer is IT itself.  And helping IT achieve a better result will be the subject of this blog over the next few months.

Linoma Software strives to meet the quality assurance that satisfies customers and certification partners. To obtain certifications, we vigorously test our secure managed file transfer solution on various enterprise operating systems to certify that our products are compatible with each vendor or provider.

Most recently, we received approval for the VMware Ready certification. It took strategic planning to run enough projects to add a load on the virtual servers running both GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services, but we prevailed and submitted successful test results to VMware.

We are pleased with our VMware Ready certification and would like to bring attention to the other designations we have earned.

IBM – GoAnywhere Director is tested and certified by the IBM Labs to run on any IBM System with Linux and to run on any Power System (p and i) with AIX, Linux, or i/OS. We are an IBM Advanced Business Partner and actively participate in software beta testing, like the recent i7.1 release.

Red Hat – Fedoras on the ready, GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services look sharp and perform flawlessly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and the upcoming 6.0. As a Red Hat ISV, we’ve participated in upgrade testing, beta testing and running on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Microsoft – As a Microsoft Certified Partner we not only have access to the latest technical knowledge for Microsoft products, we have gone through 3^rd party testing for our software and have proven that the GoAnywhere Director managed file transfer solution runs flawlessly across the entire current Windows family. Linoma Software is ranked highly among its install base for providing exceptional support and continues to test and develop for upcoming Microsoft technologies.

Linoma Software also maintains Professional ISV Partnerships with proven user groups, hardware, and software companies. Be sure to contact us if you have any questions about our various certifications.

When things get hectic and life gets crazy, let’s face it, we could all use a release. All puns aside, Linoma Software has been busy the past 5 months issuing several releases which provide our current and future clients the business edge they need in this ever changing market. Linoma released updates for Surveyor/400, Crypto Complete, GoAnywhere Services and last but not least GoAnywhere Director.

In February, Linoma released Surveyor/400 3.7. Surveyor/400 allows users to easily query and download data from IBM i to their desktops and network servers. Version 3.7 provides support for Excel 2007 with custom formatting options to create professional-looking spreadsheets. Surveyor/400 additionally supports earlier versions of Excel, as well as CSV, fixed width text, HTML and XML documents.  Surveyor/400 conveniently provides over 20 IBM i tools in one application.

In addition to Surveyor/400, Linoma also released Crypto Complete 2.20 in February. The new release of Crypto Complete 2.20 incorporated tokenization. Tokenization should be considered when sensitive data is stored on multiple systems. Tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive data with unique identification numbers (e.g. tokens) and storing the original data on a central server in encrypted form. By centralizing sensitive data, tokenization helps to thwart hackers and minimize the scope of compliance audits such as PCI. Additionally, Crypto Complete 2.20 offers faster encryption for backups while eliminating the need for intermediate save files.

Let’s fast-forward to June; Linoma released GoAnywhere Services 1.3.0. Version 1.3.0 adds enhanced security features with IP Filtering, Syslog feeds and additional Trigger actions, along with other updates and usability options. GoAnywhere Services is a secure file server that provides internal and external trading partners with a secure connection to your system for exchanging files within a fully managed and audited solution.

Also in June, Linoma released a new version of GoAnywhere Director. GoAnywhere Director 3.2.0 provides a connector for sending data using the AS2 version 1.2 standards. This includes support for multiple file attachments within a single AS2 message, synchronous MDN receipts and message integrity verification. AS2 messages can be sent over an SSL tunnel, making it a secure option for the transfer of sensitive data. Version 3.2.0 also includes Syslog server integration, advanced scheduling options, enhanced server certificate handling and FTP checksum validation options. GoAnywhere Director is a managed file transfer solution for the enterprise.

If you need any additional information about any of our product releases or if you need a solution and aren’t sure what is the best product for your circumstance, give us a call. If we don’t have the product your business needs, we can point you in the right direction.

It has been a great start to 2010 and we would like to say thanks to all of our clients for their continued support.

GoAnywhere Director, the proven Managed File Transfer solution from Linoma Software, adds another certification to its list this week with the receipt of the “Ready for Power Systems” validation from IBM. GoAnywhere Director was validated through testing by IBM to meet the criteria for applications that run on its Power Systems. The Ready for Power Systems validation demonstrates GoAnywhere Director runs on the i7, AIX, and Linux operating systems for IBM i and p servers.

Before receiving Ready for Power Systems validation, applications are tested to meet IBM’s standards – integration with IBM system management software, system and processor energy use, role-based access and application security, application availability for HA, and its ability to run in virtualized environments.

Prior to this testing, GoAnywhere Director also earned the following designations from IBM:

• Ready for IBM Systems with Linux (i, p, and z)
• IBM DB2 Universal Database – Verified by IBM
• IBM i Hardware – Verified by IBM

GoAnywhere Director is an innovative solution for automating data retrieval, translation, encryption, compression and distribution for the enterprise. With GoAnywhere’s intuitive interface and comprehensive functionality including XML, you can easily streamline and secure the transfer of data with your customers, trading partners and enterprise servers.

GoAnywhere Director and GoAnywhere Services (a secure file server), are platform independent. They provide the same role-based audit logging, automation, secure managed file transfer, and XML translation on Linux (Red Hat, SUSE), Windows^®, Mac OS X, and UNIX (Solaris, HP-UX).

Linoma Software is an IBM Advanced Business Partner.

Linoma Software was happy to be part of COMMON’s 50th Anniversary Conference. Linoma has been attending COMMON for 14 years and was happy to see many familiar faces. The weather in Orlando was beautiful and the conference was well-attended. For those of you unfamiliar with COMMON, it is the world’s largest community of IBM midrange users providing information, education, and networking among users, IBM, and related third-party solution providers. Linoma continues to develop its well-known IBM i products as well as broaden its scope by enhancing products such as GoAnywhere and Crypto Complete.

During the show, Linoma provided demos as well as conducted a survey. According to our results, 44.1% of companies are storing personal identifiable info (e.g. SSNOs, birth dates) “in the clear,” 25% are sending sensitive data unencrypted over the internet, and 48.8% of the companies interviewed are sending unencrypted backups off site. If your company is among the percentage who is not securing sensitive data be sure to contact us at info@linoma.com and we can evaluate which product would most suit your industry needs.

In case you missed it, Debby Gaffney of Fidelity International, was the winner of our prize give-away…an iPAD! Linoma will be attending COMMON, October 4-6, 2010 in San Antonio Texas. We hope to see you there!

Visit Linoma’s facebook page to see photos of the conference.

Field Encryption on the IBM i just got easier.

SQL Field Procedures are a new DB2 feature in version 7.1 that allows a user-specified “exit” program to be called whenever data is read from, inserted into, or updated in a field (column).   This is somewhat similar to database column triggers; however there are two distinct advantages:

1. Field Procedures allow data to be modified on a Read operation, which allows the exit program to automatically decrypt the field value before it is returned to the customer’s application.
2. Field Procedures provide a separate internal space to store the encrypted version of the field value.  This allows organizations to encrypt numeric fields such as packed decimal, signed decimal and integer data types without having to store the encrypted values in a separate file.

While IBM provided the hooks into the database with Field Procedures, they rely on 3^rd party vendors like us to provide the encryption functions and key management. Linoma worked closely with IBM to test the new Field Procedures and provide feedback to their development team during the early release beta program for 7.1.  This also allowed Linoma sufficient time to fully integrate Field Procedures into Crypto Complete for readiness when i 7.1 ships.

We’re excited about Field Procedures since it will allow customers to implement column-level encryption on the IBM i without modifying their applications.  This is especially important if a customer is running a canned application and/or does not want to modify their source code.

Personal data privacy is one of the greatest concerns individuals have when doing business over the web and in person.  It seems it is commonplace for a company to notify their customers that their personal and/or account information has been compromised by a hacker or a disgruntled employee (e.g. TJ Maxx, Wells Fargo, Bank of America).  While you’d think businesses would do everything they can to protect their customers’ personal information, they will weigh the risks and likelihood of a data breach happening versus the cost and time to implement such security measures.  Knowing this, the payment card industry (PCI), government agencies and many states have put together a list of requirements that businesses must follow in order to do business with them or in their state.  The problem is they often don’t enforce these regulations and fines are only imposed after a data breach happens.

I just returned from Framingham, Massachusetts where we exhibited at the Northeast User Group conference.  Massachusetts has a very strict data privacy law.  Not only do businesses in Massachusetts need to protect their customers’ personal information but so do businesses who have in their database the personal identifiable information of people from Massachusetts.  One of the requirements says organizations must:

“Encrypt all transmitted records and files containing personal information that will travel across public networks.”

Several of our customers mentioned our products have helped them meet the Massachusetts’ data privacy requirements.  They have implemented field encryption using Crypto Complete and are using our GoAnywhere Director to encrypt file transfers.  They have minimized the risk of a data breach happening at their company by using both solutions.  Unfortunately, I also had many other individuals stop by Linoma’s Booth who said their management does not want to allocate any resources (time or money) towards securing personal and confidential data.  They know they should do it and are required to do so, but it’s just not high on their priority list right now.  I’m afraid this mindset may be more popular than we think, which is concerning.

Is the company you work for securing personal data?  Is your company looking for a solution to secure data?  Find out today how we can help your company avoid sending the inevitable letter that your confidential information has been breached. Not only can we help you avoid facing public humiliation, our products can help save you time and money by streamlining the secure data transfer process.

If you are interested in seeing how Linoma’s solutions can encrypt your data at rest and when it’s transferred, don’t hesitate to contact us at 800-949-4696.

Brian Pick

Sales Manager

Picked up my new iPad last night from the local Apple store.  It was busy in there, but they had plenty of employees to help the eager customers!  They had just received a shipment of iPads a few hours earlier, so I was in and out of the store with the little iPad box in just a few minutes.

I had been reading all the hype on the internet and thought it would be fun to try out this slick new device.

Both my kids have iTouches and love them, but I always thought the  screens were too small to be useful for internet browsing, watching videos, etc.  From what I had read from critics, the iPad was nothing more than a supersized iTouch… which I found is mostly true… but that big touch screen on the iPad is awesome!

First thing I did when I unboxed my iPad was to fire up Safari (the built-in browser) and  see how well it rendered web pages.  It did a nice job for web surfing.  The pages rendered very well.  It was easy to click on hyperlinks (using my finger instead of a mouse was a little weird at first, but it works great with that big screen.  I only “fat fingered” a couple links.).  Only thing I found it doesn’t support is Flash content, but hopefully Apple will get enough flack and will eventually support it.

Next I tried to connect to our GoAnywhere Director product through the iPad’s Safari.  It took me right to the login screen.  I keyed in the GoAnywhere user/password (using the touch screen keypad) and hit submit.  Login Failed!  Found out that I mistyped the user id, which is easy to do until you get used to typing on this thing.  Once I corrected it, I hit submit again and it took me right to the GoAnywhere dashboard.

GoAnywhere’s screens were rendered perfectly!  All of the graphics were lined up nicely.  The font styles and colors looked very sharp.  The drop down menus worked.  I was able to create a couple projects in GoAnywhere and execute.  No problem.  The performance was very good.   GoAnywhere’s client interface does not use applets, ActiveX controls or Flash… just HTML and JavaScript.  So I suspect that is why iPad’s Safari did not have any problems with it.  So when you are on the road with your iPad, you too will be able to work with your copy of GoAnywhere!

Besides using the browser, iPad is great for watching videos too.  It has a NetFlix app that lets you watch movies real time, which is great.    Eventually I hope most NetFlix movies are available to watch online so I don’t have to goto my mailbox for DVDs any more.

At first I was thinking about giving away this iPad at the next trade show as a prize, but now I think I will keep this one for myself.. and buy another one for the giveaway

The iPad is addictive.

~ Bob