fifiana hutapea: How Salesforce & Box are changing the landscape in regulated industries fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

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With an aim to encourage the adoption of cloud CRM solutions in regulated industries, Salesforce recently announced the launch of a new platform called Salesforce Shield, which came shortly after Box introduced the general availability of Box Governance. Like Shield, it also focuses on ensuring cloud customers meet legal, regulatory and business policies regarding data storage and transfer.

For organizations that operate in the healthcare, finance and legal industries, both Salesforce Shield and Box Governance may bring the highly sought after flexibility to cloud services without disrupting the organizations’ security requirements. Meanwhile, companies providing cloud-based services to these regulated industries provides a new opportunity to increase marketshare — and in doing so, change the landscape for cloud services. Here’s how…

Cloud adoption in finance and health care

The fact that the leading cloud CRM and cloud collaboration providers have launched solutions for the regulated industries almost at the same time could indicate a new trend that isn’t likely to disappear. Namely, after several years of struggles with cloud implementations, organizations that have strict data security policies have started changing their attitudes towards the cloud. A recent survey by Cloud Security Alliance revealed that the cloud adoption in the finance sector increased significantly in 2014.

Also, 61 percent of professionals working in the finance sector are in the process of creating a cloud strategy within their organizations, according to the same survey. Conversely, only 18 percent say they are planning to continue using the private clouds.

Similarly, the healthcare industry is also seeing an accelerated adoption of cloud solutions. Skyhigh Q2 2015 report on the cloud adoption and risk in health care suggests that more institutions are embracing the cloud to increase employee productivity and cut costs.

Compared to previous years, the use of private clouds in these industries is gradually decreasing — mainly thanks to the growing number of secure cloud solutions designed in accordance with the national security standards. Among them, Salesforce Shield and Box Governance are probably the products that would revolutionize the industries and enable even more organizations to migrate sensitive data to the cloud.

Secure offerings

With the ability to support the strict regulations for data access and retention, Salesforce Shield opens a new door for the organizations that were previously limited to using private clouds for security reasons. The service includes a number of security features designed to enable clients to safely work with the cloud without fear of violating federal regulations. More specifically, organizations in regulated industries will now have access to:

Platform encryption native to the Salesforce1 platform.
Data archive designed to help organizations cut costs by keeping data in “nearline storage.”
A field audit trail that enables companies to keep track of changes and ensure they are using only the most accurate data.
Event monitoring for the purposes of increasing visibility of the actions associated with the data use.

Unlike Salesforce, which enables organizations to build trusted cloud apps “using clicks, not code,” Box Governance is a new add-on service that adds advanced security features to Box’s widely used sharing and collaboration SaaS. The company has introduced three key capabilities in order to adjust the service to the needs of organizations that need to ensure compliance:

Retention management, which helps administrators control preservation and deletion schedules of their sensitive documents.
Content security policies that protect clients’ sensitive data.
Defensible eDiscovery to comply with data discovery requests.

The impact

Historically, the cloud has been associated with numerous security risks, which is why its adoption in the regulated industries has been notably slow. While the enterprises managed to find an intermediary solution by implementing hybrid clouds, businesses in regulated industries took more time to actually develop efficient public cloud strategies.

This is especially true for the health care industry, which has probably seen the tightest constraints regarding IT infrastructure innovation. The challenges here range from managing employee productivity apps to authentication, access and audit paradigms, as mentioned in a study by SecureLink. Working with highly sensitive citizens’ data, healthcare institutions have had a limited number of IT solutions at their disposal.

For the past few months, however, we’ve been seeing a significant increase in the number of apps that support HIPAA and FINRA compliance for healthcare and finance organizations. Unsurprisingly, this contributed to accelerating the adoption of new IT solutions in the sector, with the cloud leading the innovation process.

The new offerings by Salesforce and Box are likely to become leaders in the regulated industries market given their already established reputation of reliable cloud providers. The precisely-defined features are likely to be welcomed by numerous organizations worldwide, significantly changing the landscape in the regulated industries, as previously mentioned.

However, this does not mean that their struggles associated with IT innovation will be over. Salesforce Shield and Box Governance may make a deep impact on the way regulated industries use the cloud, but a number of other IT challenges will remain.

This mostly relates to the trends of outsourcing IT components and managing their implementation, which will force these industries to keep improving their strategies until they’re sure they’ve found all the right solutions for their needs.