I just read an interesting study released by Symantec focused on employee attitudes towards cloud apps and services vs. IT attitudes towards these topics. The results were not surprising. Essentially, employees want to harness the power of modern cloud securityapps and services – and care little about the overarching risks to the company in terms of data compliance, security, etc.
IT departments, it seems, must find out ways to meet the demands of today’s knowledge worker – while also keeping as much control as possible over company data, devices and systems.

Of course this issue continues to be compounded by the fact that more and more workers are using personal devices to access corporate data, and using social media to conduct at least some portion of business activities. Add to that the popularity of “citizen development” and IT’s job gets even harder.

At Caspio, we understand the challenges facing today’s IT departments. And in many ways, our platform makes it easier for IT to empower workers, enabling them to go mobile and create fast solutions to business needs, but without the security and other risks associated with simply “grabbing a cloud app” off the virtual shelves of an app store. Instead, Caspio splits the difference, so to speak.

When it comes to sharing data – Caspio is a great tool for not only leveraging cloud services to enable simple storage and sharing – it can do a lot more. Any data set or table can be password protected, and access levels can be set on broad or down to the individual user-level. And, the system can be designed that different user types see differing views: interfaces can be designed for employees versus admins, and Caspio can easily be modified to limit the fields displayed for customer or partner views – something that simply cannot be done sharing an Excel spreadsheet over a site like Dropbox.

Also, Caspio does not put artificial limits on what a “user” is in the system. User lists can be driven by any data table, so that internal and external people (employees and large sets of customers and partners, etc.) can be quickly made users. And, Usage Logs is a feature that lets you know which users have accessed what data, and when.  With Caspio, employees are solving their business problems – in a way that lets IT sleep easier at night.

And when it comes to going mobile, IT can either create apps in Caspio that automate processes or extend data access to mobile devices easily. And since Caspio requires no coding – employees can build their own solutions – that IT can then bless and deploy for mobile web access. This allows knowledge workers to have access to data whenever and wherever they need it, but inside a cloud system that IT can better control versus simply allowing employees to throw data across consumer-oriented offerings.

Like it or not, the demands on IT are changing. Mobility, social sharing, and the ease-of-use of cloud apps are becoming “must have” experiences inside almost every organization today. Personal device usage is increasing, and IT cannot expect to keep up with the proliferation of data access points. But, by using a platform like Caspio, IT departments can limit the amount of “rogue” app usage and build web based databases and apps that empower workers, while limiting the risks to data security.

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