Reading, UK - 9th November 2011 - Actiance, enablers of the safe
and compliant use of unified communications, collaboration and Web
2.0, today announced that FMG Support, the UK's leading incident
management and roadside assistance provider, is using Vantage from
Actiance to augment security and compliance controls as it
upgrades its unified communications to Microsoft Lync.
Microsoft Lync is extremely effective as a unified communications (UC)
platform, but it does not natively provide the capabilities to
meet the corporate governance best practices that FMG Support
follows, nor does it prevent users from using unauthorised public
real-time communications. Vantage from Actiance enables FMG
Support to set acceptable use policies for each employee, such as
what departments can communicate with each other, which
applications are approved for use on the enterprise network and
what types of information are restricted from leaving the
organisation.
Vantage's centralised policy setting mechanism recognises not
only Microsoft Lync, but other UC platforms, public instant
messaging (IM) services and other Web 2.0 applications,
allowing FMG Support to manage its collaborative communications
environment with ease.
"Federating will make it easier for us to collaborate and work
more closely with our partners, while maintaining a corporate
standard of communication, but we can also see that it will open
the door to an increased risk of data leakage and malware," says
Jamie Shields, IT Professional of FMG Support. "In addition we also
wanted the ability to effectively archive conversations made over
Microsoft Lync. We have set procedures for any changes to contracts
or other legally binding documents, but that doesn't mean that
someone might not accidentally say something over Group Chat that
might be misconstrued. Actiance gives us the ability to go back to
that message months or even years later to review what was actually
said and to look at the context of the message."
Vantage provides a comprehensive archive of all exchanges that
take place over UC and federated services as well as native public
IM services. FMG's policy is that that all business conversations
need to be stored securely, however UC's multi-dimensional nature
can make the process of archiving, storing and retrieving
multi-party chats exponentially more complex.
A simple chat conversation might include numerous participants
joining at different times, creating a requirement to understand
the context surrounding each participants understanding of these
conversations - who entered - and left the conversation at what
point during the discussion. Vantage enables FMG Support to
understand the context of conversation easily, no matter how long
ago it took place. Integrated with Active Directory, Vantage
enables FMG Support to map a user's buddy-name to their Active
Directory corporate identity, helping to identify individuals to
their corporate account.
The fleet management firm has been using secure web gateway
product,
Unified Security Gateway (USG) from Actiance since 2008. FMG
Support initially chose the solution as it provided the ability to
archive the transcripts of public IM conversations, a capability
that traditional secure web gateway solutions were unable to
do.
"Actiance has already proved its platform is more than capable
of securing and managing our access to UC and other real-time
communications and web 2.0 applications such as Facebook and
Twitter," concludes Shields. "As we enter our next phase of UC
deployment with Microsoft Lync, it is good to have a partner that
understands the fast moving world of communications and the
importance to us of ensuring that embracing the latest
communication tools doesn't mean losing control."
About Actiance
Actiance helps organizations manage, secure and ensure compliance
across unified communications, collaboration and Web 2.0
applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks. Actiance's
award-winning platforms are used by 9 of the top 10 US banks and
284 FINRA regulated firms globally.
The Actiance platform allows organizations to gain visibility of
applications in use, apply usage and content policies, ensure
compliance and gain valuable insights across the communications and
collaboration channels. Actiance supports all leading social
networks, unified communications and collaboration providers and IM
platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!,
AOL, Skype, Cisco, Microsoft, Jive, and IBM.
Actiance is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more
information visit or call 888-349-3223.
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