Like many in our industry, we do our fair share of trade shows, and as anyone who has ever exhibited will tell you, it’s a lot of work.

In our company, Lu Ann handles all of the arrangements.  She books the plane tickets, reserves the rooms, secures the exhibition space, orders the exhibitor badges, organizes and ships the collateral, and coordinates a thousand other details to ensure everything goes smoothly for the team when they arrive.

The sales team does all of the manual labor, including packing and repacking the booth displays and equipment, helping load and unload the heavy boxes onto the shipping company’s truck, and of course setting up and tearing down the booth.  Again, so many details to manage to make sure everything is perfect for the opening of the show.

Months in advance, our marketing team is planning giveaways and prizes, updating collateral, and trying to add new ways to catch visitors’ attention.

Throughout the show, we’re working hard to connect, meeting new trade show participants and vendors, and reconnecting with long-time customers and partners.  We’re striking up conversations with people who pass our booth, and we’re walking the floor saying hi to old friends and introducing ourselves to new ones.  It’s an energizing, exhausting, rewarding process.

And of all of the trade shows that we attend and/or where we exhibit, COMMON holds a special place for us.  The COMMON community is tightly knit and loyal, and every show is like a family reunion.    New deals are forged, partnerships are discovered, and all the while relationships are built and nurtured.  When we reconnect with customers or friends, it’s as if we’re just picking up the conversation right where we left off from last year’s COMMON conference.

As I approach my one-year anniversary as marketing manager at Linoma Software, I’m fortunate to have been invited to attended my first COMMON conference. When our president Bob Luebbe toured me around from booth to booth introducing me to people, I quickly realized the level of connection Linoma has with the IBM i community.

It was wonderful to finally meet in person all of the folks I’d been working with all year:  Jennifer and Megan from iPro Developer; Chris, Kara, David and Jeff from MC Press; Tami and Darryl from IBM Systems Magazine; Dan,Timothy, Kim and Jenny with IT Jungle; and Dan Cheney, our most prolific blogger on this and the GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer blog whom I finally got to hug.  It was especially amazing to spend quality time with my friend and mentor Bill Rice, with Humanized Communication.

Today, as we’re breaking down the booth, saying goodbye to friends, and anticipating the long flights home, it’s clear that the IBM i community is thriving.  We are proud to be a part of it all, and are already planning for next spring’s COMMON conference.

Tokenization in the data security world is the process of moving sensitive data from a company network to a separate location or sever, and replacing and referencing that data on the company server with a unique token.

If hackers attempt to access sensitive information like credit card numbers from a server, they’ll instead encounter the token which prevents them from finding the original data without a specific encryption key or knowledge of the tokenization system.

For example, say a merchant acquires a credit card number by swiping a customer’s card with a card reader.  If the merchant has implemented tokenization, this card number information is immediately replaced in the merchant’s database by a token number while the actual card number is sent and stored (in encrypted form) at a different location, along with the reference from the token.

Because the actual card number is never stored in the merchant’s front-end system, hackers have a much more difficult time stealing it. Customers can therefore be assured that it is safe to let that merchant use their card information because the actual credit card numbers are not stored in an easily accessible location.

All organizations that capture credit card data are required by the PCI DSS government regulations to secure and protect this data.  Originally, this presented a challenge to the payment industry until Shift4 Corporation presented tokenization solutions at an industry Security Summit in 1995.  The adoption of tokenization became a popular solution to meet the PCI DSS compliance regulations.

>>Check out these white papers discussing PCI DSS compliance issues, and data breach threats

Other industries are beginning to adopt tokenization to protect confidential information such as banking transactions, medical records, criminal records, vehicle driver information, loan applications, stock trading and voter registration.

Finding the most efficient way to implement tokenization is challenging, but the growing threat of cyber attack and the expense of data breach have motivated IT shops to research options in earnest.

A variety of third-party software solutions, such as Linoma Software’s Crypto Complete, deliver tokenization tools as well as additional options for managing encryption keys, audit logs, message alerts; storing tokenized data; automatically assigning token identifiers; and providing a central management platform for the entire tokenization process.

When a greedy hacker in anticipation of scoring a cache of customer credit card data finds instead a series of tokens, companies win another battle in the war against cyber thieves.

As any AIX administrator or programmer knows, file transfers can be a huge headache.  Writing all of those shell scripts is not only time consuming, but it’s tedious and presents many opportunities for errors.  Then there’s keeping track of which files need to be sent, which need to be placed in the DMZ for trading partners to retrieve, and which ones may be being sent ad-hoc from elsewhere in the company.

Another huge hassle is verifying that every file actually reached its intended recipient intact, which often requires checking multiple times and then tracking down what went wrong.

Finally, don’t forget the pressure to meet compliance regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and state privacy laws.  With the Global Systems data breach still fresh in the news, it’s obvious that no AIX administrator wants to have to explain how sensitive data was compromised.

Fortunately, there are tools and processes available that can minimize the time and effort involved with file transfers while increasing efficiency and data security.

We invite you to sit in on this AIX-only webinar on Thursday, April 12, at noon CDT to learn about how a managed file transfer solution can cure the headaches of manual file transfers while preventing future headaches related to the possibility of compromised data.

We hope you’ll join us!

REGISTER FOR THE AIX WEBINAR HERE

If RSA means data security and data integrity to you, then you’ll understand why any company interested in protecting the data of its customers would be at the RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco this week. The annual RSA conference, “The Great Cipher – Mightier than the Sword” is rolling out the red carpet at the Moscone Center for companies of all sizes to learn about cyber threats, data breaches, social engineering, compliance, risk management, and cloud security.

For years, Linoma Software has been encrypting and protecting sensitive and personally identifiable information in computing environments covering non-profit, enterprise and government institutions. Participating in the annual RSA Conference provides the opportunity for thousands of companies to come and see the new secure communication features in the GoAnywhere Suite of products.

New features like Cyber Attack Monitors, Secure Mail that hosts and securely delivers ad-hoc files to recipients and Wizards that build complex conditions for ETL data handling and transformation have been generating a lot of buzz.

If you’re at the RSA conference, stop by Booth #239 and say hi to the Linoma Software team.  You can also hear a five-minute intro as to why compliance fears and data breaches are not part of the GoAnywhere lexicon. If you’re not at the RSA Conference, be sure to visit the GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer page for more details.