Guest Post - Schools look to SafeSync for best-in-class collaboration and data sharing

Organizations of all sizes know that conditions are going to remain challenging throughout 2012. Forced to do more with less, improve efficiencies, cut costs and become more agile, they’re increasingly aware that the technology they choose to support their efforts could be the difference between success and failure.

Data is the lifeblood of any organization and the education sector is no exception, where teachers and administrators need to share large volumes of sensitive student information that could prove disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands. Under intense financial pressure, their use of traditional email-based methods for sharing and collaborating fall well short of the mark on security and can’t deal with volumes required.

Trend Micro SafeSync for Business is a cloud-based service that enables users to securely access, share and sync data from any internet-connected mobile or fixed device. The productivity benefits are enormous and because Trend Micro runs the infrastructure, including the cloud-based servers, it’s extremely cost effective and more importantly; secure.

You may have heard of Dropbox. Well, SafeSync for Business is similar but more secure, easier to us and designed for larger organizations. Users can simply right click on any folder on their desktop and make it a SafeSync folder, sending the data up to the cloud to securely share with others.

Teachers can share large files or groups of files with students for homework assignments by uploading them to the cloud and then sharing a simple link to provide read-only access. They can also stop sharing and disable links to files at any time or even set an expiration date. All data is sent via 256-bit AES Bank level encryption, and very soon information stored in Trend Micro’s data centers will be encrypted as well.

Teachers and administrators can share data two ways SafeSync for Business: “One Way” and “Team Folder”. The One Way sharing can be done with anyone by simply sharing a link to your file or folder. The user can then download the files or view the folder and save it to their computer. For extra security, users can password-protect and set expiration dates on files and links, or even allow one-time shares. The Team Folder allows for two-way collaboration on any file in the folder. You can control who can access this folder and what their rights are to ensure only those you trust have access. It’s just like having a file server, without the cost or need to maintain it.

SafeSync is the perfect fit for the education sector – leveraging Trend Micro’s expertise in the cloud to enable more efficient, agile and secure ways of accessing, collaborating and sharing data for a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Put simply, in challenging financial times like these it could be the difference between success and failure.