Sales Are Soaring

Thanks in no small part to having well designed and executed products and a superior support team, our enthusiastic sales team spent 2012 shattering sales records, and have already topped themselves in the first quarter of 2013.  We’ve been able to help customers from virtually every industry, including healthcare, finance and banking, insurance, manufacturing, education, retail, and government, and as we hear back from them about how GoAnywhere or Crypto Complete or Surveyor or RPG Toolbox has made their lives easier and their data more secure, we can share their stories with others seeking an affordable, enterprise-level solution.

Trade Show Season Is In Full Swing

We’ve already met lots of new people — and reconnected with old friends — at the RPG Summit, RSA Conference, COMMON, and InfoSec in Orlando, and this weekend we’re exhibiting with HANDD Business Solutions, one of our partners in the UK, at InfoSec Europe.  Then, we’re first-time exhibitors at the FOSE government conference in Washington D.C. in May and then we’re back in Europe for the COMMON-Europe conference in June.

We’ve Launched a New Website

If you haven’t visited our new GoAnywhere.com website yet, you should check it out.  Our team worked very hard to redesign not only the look and feel, but also the navigation to make it easier for visitors to find what they need.  We hope you’ll take a look and let us know what you think.

GoAnywhere OpenPGP Studio is Now Available

Last month we published a free desktop tool that can encrypt and decrypt files using OpenPGP encryption.  It’s a great solution for those who need to occasionally encrypt files, and OpenPGP Studio also helps organize and manage keys.  You can download OpenPGP Studio for free here.

We’ve also added some new faces to our team and are working on some pretty cool software enhancements as well as our first mobile app, which should be available very soon.

As always, we welcome your ideas and your feedback, and if you’ve got a great story to share about how one of our products has helped you work more efficiently or kept your data better protected, let us know. We’d love to hear it!

Bob Luebbe, our Chief Architect, is presenting two sessions:  Beyond FTP — Securing File Transfers at 5:00 tonight and Encryption with DB2 Field Procedures in V7R1 at 8:00 tomorrow morning.

We’ve got a brand new booth design (and a brand new website design), and we’re giving away prizes to anyone who stops to spin the prize wheel.  In addition, we’re sponsoring two drawings. Customers can register for a $100 gift card giveaway, and anyone can register for our drawing to award a Google Nexus 7 tablet.  We’ll be drawing the winners right after the Passport Drawing tomorrow, and you must be present to win.

If you’re in Austin, be sure to stop by Booth #500 and say hi to Bob, Brian, Donnie, Ron or Susan, and we’ll see if we can get you some Baker’s chocolate and another prize or two.

In today’s issue of IT Jungle’s Four Hundred Stuff, Alex Woodie takes a closer look at these customer success stories.  Customers include AAA Cooper Transportation, American Fidelity and Liberty Insurance (AF&L), BlueGrass Mailing, Londen Insurance, Monterey Mushrooms, P.C. Richard and Son, and United Security, Life, and Health.

We’ve also been getting lots of feedback on our video showcasing the rave reviews our customer support team is getting. Given that our top priorities are creating superior products and delivering exceptional customer service, it’s gratifying to get these kinds of comments from our customers.

If you’d like to share your experience with Linoma Software, we’d love to hear from you! You can leave a comment on LinkedIn or on Google+, or you can contact us about doing a case study or video.  And, if you have questions or want more information about any of our products, please let us know.

We’re also hoping to connect with current customers to see if we can get your thoughts about Linoma Software products.  We’ll be shooting customer videos at several shows and we’re hoping to include customers from a wide variety of industries.  Please contact us if you will be attending any of these shows.

Our first stop is at the RSA Conference in San Francisco from Feb. 25-28, where we’ll be networking with security professionals from around the world.  We’ll be exhibiting at Booth #242 from Monday through Thursday.

Then, we have a few weeks until we head to Atlanta for the RPG & DB2 Summit on March 19 where we’ll also be exhibiting.  It’s a great time to talk to developers in the trenches to see what’s changing and find out how we can better serve their needs.

Two weeks later we go south again, this time to Austin, Texas for the COMMON User’s Group Annual Meeting and Exposition, April 7-10.  Not only are we looking forward to catching up with industry colleagues and making new connections, we’re also excited to be in such a fun and vibrant city.  We’ll be set up in Booth #500 and hope to see a lot of familiar faces there.

Orlando, Florida our next stop on our spring trade show tour, where we’ll again be rubbing elbows with the data security experts at InfoSec World from April 15 to April 17.  We’ll have our display set up in Booth #109 to showcase how GoAnywhere helps simplify, automate and secure data transfers.

We’re also sending one of our team to London at the end of April to support our UK distributors at InfoSecurity Europe.  Brian will be meeting with several of our partners in England, France and elsewhere to see how we can support their sales and marketing efforts.

The last big tradeshow of the spring is FOSE, a conference designed exclusively for government technology professionals. Held in conjunction with the Government Security Expo,  FOSE takes place May 14-16 in Washington D.C., and we’ll be exhibiting in Booth #640.

If you’re planning to attend any of these shows, please let us know, or stop by our booth.  You can register to win prizes, pick up some cool giveaways, and maybe spend a few minutes on video telling us what you like about working with Linoma.  We really hope to see you!

Get Your FTP Server in Compliance

Thursday, January 31 at Noon Central

With the recently added rules for the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that now holds trading partners and business associates accountable if they also handle patient data, it’s a good time to review whether your FTP server is updated and ready to meet compliance requirements. Learn how to keep your data as well as trading partner files protected within your network and still allow external access without opening inbound network ports.  You can also see a demo of Linoma Software’s GoAnywhere™, a managed file transfer solution that includes a secure FTP server and a reverse proxy DMZ gateway with clustering and load balancing capabilities to ensure high availability.

Learn more

IBM i Encryption Made Easy with DB2 Field Procedures

Now Available On Demand

During this recorded webinar, you can learn about how to make the DB2 Field Procedures Tool in IBM version 7.1 work even more efficiently as part of a more comprehensive solution, one that makes it easier to implement encryption, manage keys, and generate auditing reports so important for meeting compliance regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS,.  You can also see a demo of Linoma’s popular encryption software Crypto Complete.

Learn more

All of our webinars are recorded, so if you register and are not able to attend live, you’ll be able to review the webinar at a more convenient time.

We look forward to having you join us and will be happy to answer any questions you have.

 For years we’ve received emails, phone calls, and comments at trade shows about how much our customers appreciate our support team, and we’re always so glad to hear that.  Our dual missions at Linoma Software is to develop (and enhance) the best possible products and to provide exceptional support for those products.

Our core support team is the first to arrive* and the last to leave each day, and between scheduled trainings, emails, online chats and phone calls, they patiently work through any questions a customer may have, and happily pass along suggestions for enhancements to our development team.

We invite you to watch this video, and if you’ve had a good experience with someone from our support team, please let us know.  You can leave a comment below,  email us, call us, or write a quick note on LinkedIn.  We could even make you a video star!

We love patting our support folks on the back for a job well done, and thank you for your rave reviews.

**Ok, the developers are here early and stay late, too!  Sometimes really late!

One step in creating a stronger defense is to employ field or column-level encryption to protect sensitive data at rest.

Implementing a custom field encryption project on IBM i used to be a notoriously long and painful process.  Programming code changes for field level encryption required a steep learning curve, costly programming resources, and even more time in testing, validating and updating the changed application source code. Most companies simply could not justify the additional strain on their budgets for this level of project development requirements.

In response to this challenge, IBM released its OS version 7.1 with DB2 field procedure (FieldProcs) in April of 2010 that greatly simplified the field encryption process.  With the new FieldProcs technology, encryption projects can be streamlined because the field procedures are invoked at the database level, making it transparent to the applications. The FieldProcs can be coded to automatically encrypt the field on Inserts and Updates, and subsequently decrypt the field only for authorized users on Read operations.  Subsequently, FieldProcs have become very important to those businesses that have legacy applications and limited budgets.

FieldProcs are a great step for improving the viability of field level encryption projects. But even with this, many companies don’t have the resources to integrate and manage the FieldProcs which is why third-party software solutions, like Linoma Software’s Crypto Complete, are valuable.  Crypto Complete will generate and manage the FieldProcs on the fields within the files.

Crypto Complete also includes the key management, audit logs and access controls needed for PCI DSS and data privacy compliance. The value of using Crypto Complete for field encryption cannot be understated as it can greatly minimize the learning curve and reduce the implementation resource requirements from weeks to hours.

Not only does it attract negative attention and erode customer confidence, an announcement that your company’s data has or may have been compromised can result in some steep financial penalties.  If fines associated with violating regulations like HIPAA or state privacy laws don’t get you, potential lawsuits might.

Take LinkedIn, for example.  Earlier this month, the social network of business professionals reported that nearly 6.5 million encrypted passwords had been leaked online.

Today, Mashable.com reports that LinkedIn is facing a $5 million civil lawsuit from a user claiming that LinkedIn’s security policy violated industry standards for database security.

There really are no lessons for the rest of us to learn from this latest breach, because most of us already know what we’re supposed to do.

• Keep passwords secure, reasonably complex, and change them regularly.
• Ensure your company is using only the most secure encryption standards like AES or Open PGP.
• Stay abreast of the latest news and techniques for keeping your company security policies and practices up to date and as impenetrable as possible.
• Invest in solutions that streamline your data encryption processes, that include comprehensive auditing and reporting tools, and that ensure the security of your data at rest and in motion.

The question is how much longer can you postpone taking these steps to ensure that your company isn’t making news next week with an embarrassing and costly data breach?

Beyond FTP: Automating and Securing File Transfers
Thursday, June 14, 2012
12:00-1:00 CDT

For more information or to register for this event,
please visit our webinar registration page.

For a real life example of the benefits of managed file transfer, check out this System i manager’s story.

Ernie Iannucci from AF&L Insurance Company describes how much time and headache his IT team saved when they transitioned from doing each transfer manually to implementing a managed file transfer solution.

Watch Ernie’s story now

Laptops are one of the most popular targets for disk encryption.

However, companies have discovered that it requires a lot of planning and time to implement laptop encryption properly.

First of all, disk drives must be in good condition with no disk errors, and experts recommend that they be de-fragmented before installing the encryption software.

Once the time-consuming de-fragmentation task is completed, encrypting the drive will take an additional 2- 4 hours depending on the size of the drive.  Employing disk encryption for a large number of laptops in the organization will therefore result in some significant downtime for their users.

Some companies are touting disk encryption as their “end all” for meeting compliance requirements.  But it is not a silver bullet.  For instance, once a laptop is placed on the network, the data on the encrypted disks could potentially be accessed by savvy online hackers.  Once access is gained, all information on the compromised laptop could then be easily downloaded from the laptop by the hacker.

For those companies that deal with credit cards, PCI DSS compliance standards involve a complex series of requirements that disk encryption cannot solve on its own. Here are just two items from the PCI checklist:

• A user’s access to protected data must be managed separately from his or her access to the operating system that the data resides on.  Therefore, if the secure data is stored on an MS Windows server, access control to the sensitive data must be managed by an application other than in Active Directory.

• Cryptographic keys and cardholder data must be encrypted wherever it may be stored, including removable media such as USB drives, CDs, DVDs, or tape backups.  However, disk encryption does not encrypt data if it’s moved to other devices.

IT professionals are discovering that the best way to meet PCI DSS and other similar regulations is to keep sensitive data off of laptops whenever possible. Sensitive data can be more easily secured and controlled by IT professionals within centralized corporate database systems. The data can then be encrypted at the field level within these database systems.  Along with effective key management and audit trails, an effective database encryption solution will provide a much higher level of protection for this sensitive data.

To maximize their time and resources, many companies are turning to third party vendors, such as Linoma Software’s Crypto Complete, which provide an effective solution for field encryption without the need to make programming or database changes.

Keeping data secure is a constant battle, and given the high cost of data breach, it could be one of the most critical tasks a company tackles.  As hackers get more creative, relying on encryption best practices may be the best defense IT has.