Meet the Team

Greetings, readers! We hope that this inaugural “Hot List” round-up post finds you well and at the end of a productive week.

The DataMotion Blog has recently hosted a variety of thought leadership topics, including an in-depth look at the zero trust model (and how DataMotion’s own zero trust strategy keeps our customers’ data secure), a glimpse at the data breach risks lurking within your enterprise on both the IT and business sides, and some takeaways from June’s DirectTrust Summit. We’ve also included a few recommended reads from ‘round the web we think you’ll find to be of interest. (Some stories may require a subscription.)

We hope you find these items to be of interest! If you have questions about DataMotion and how we can help your enterprise, please visit us at datamotion.com.

Danger for Data, Part One: Five Back-End Breach Risk Factors Whether your enterprise will experience a data breach is a matter of when, not if. In this first installment of a three-part series, DataMotion CEO Bob Janacek offers insights on where risks lie within your IT infrastructure.

Danger for Data, Part Two: Seven Pain Points in Your Processes In the second installment of this three-part series, Bob Janacek continues the conversation and discusses where risks for a data breach live on the business side–specifically, concerning your enterprise’s people and processes.

DataMotion: A Zero Trust Model You Can Trust You’re likely familiar with the trust but verify strategy, but what about zero trust? In this entry to the DataMotion Blog, Bob Janacek speaks to the benefits of a zero trust strategy, and how we use zero trust to enhance our customers’ experience—and the integrity of their data in motion.

Directly Speaking: The 2021 DirectTrust™ Summit We were pleased to participate in the DirectTrust Summit, which took place June 9^th and 10^th. In this post, DataMotion’s Business Development Director, Doug Rubino, shared some of his event takeaways.

Cybersecurity as a culture, schools as ransomware targets, and European privacy regulations are some hot topics we’ve rounded up for you:

From Forbes: Cybersecurity Is A Culture, Not A Product

From MSN: The Cybersecurity 202: Schools are another prime ransomware target (msn.com)

From WSJ Pro: European Privacy Regulators Take Aim at Firms’ Cybersecurity Failures (wsj.com)

We have your fix—subscribe for our monthly newsletter, and visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

We blasted into 2021 with some pretty significant changes to our products and the overall way that customers and prospects experience DataMotion. To recap, we made it even easier to learn about, try, and buy our APIs and pre-built solutions. For example, by visiting our brand-new self-service center, you can choose from a variety of our services to try out for absolutely no charge. It doesn’t matter if you want to try our secure message center APIs for exchanging PII, PCI, or other sensitive data or try our Direct Secure Messaging APIs for exchanging electronic medical records, such as those used in telehealth, it’s all right there, in the self-service center. And we are not stopping there.

We sat down with DataMotion CEO, Bob Janacek, to discuss the reasoning behind this evolution in more detail, dive into our latest API release, and get a glimpse at where we’re headed during the rest of 2021. We’d like to provide you with a summary of our conversation.

As was mentioned, DataMotion evolved in a big way in 2020. The main reasoning behind this? Well, to put it simply, it was to serve our website visitors and customers better. Of course, we can go into more detail than that. This is what Bob had to say about it:

“Customer needs always evolve, and we experienced a few years of change in just the past twelve months due to the unique constraints presented by the pandemic. So it’s essential that we continue to be a trusted resource for our developer and end-user customers, giving them the tools they need to excel in the world of secure, remote digital business.   

Addressing this demand meant we could benefit our customers in two ways. First, while we love talking to each of you, we understand that not everyone wants to pick up the phone and speak with our sales team, however charming and knowledgable they may be. Now, you don’t have to, you can easily learn about all of our products on our website, sign up for a free account, or test out one of our trials by yourself and only buy when you’re ready. Second, this self-service method is ideal for individuals who want to sign up for a trial outside of our normal business hours. Perhaps you’re a night owl or you live in a different time zone. You can now sign up for a trial at 3:00AM EST and immediately start testing out our products. In the past, you’d have to wait until our business hours began for a member of our team to get in touch with you.”

In summary, the main driving-factor behind the changes that we have already implemented and our roadmap for 2021, is to meet our customers and prospects needs for a simple, streamlined experience that enables them to research, try and implement tools for secure, remote digital business. So, now that we took a quick look back at the past year, let’s move on to discuss our first release for 2021  – a new API.

At the beginning of March, we released the secure message delivery API, the first of a series of transactional APIs. This API is a bit different than the other APIs that we currently offer. To start, instead of being an entire suite of APIs, it’s instead the delivery component of our suite of secure message center APIs, which can be quickly integrated into your mobile app, portal, or workflow.

“We heard from developers that sometimes they have projects that need a very lightweight way to securely send a sensitive document or message – they don’t always need the entire ecosystem. And they would like the cost to be on a per-transaction basis, so they only pay for what they use. The secure message delivery API, as well as future transactional APIs, are meant to fill these needs and to give developers more options so they can choose the best API or suite of APIs for their project.”

Knowing that this API offers a more focused range of functions than the secure message center APIs, we’d expect that the use cases would be somewhat different. We asked Bob to provide us with an example of how a developer may use it:

“This API is meant for applications sending sensitive data, such as a financial services mobile app, an insurance member portal, or even services that provide your credit score. It allows developers to give the users of those applications the ability to share sensitive data displayed in their app or portal with an external source by the click of a button. Because of this, it greatly enhances the usefulness of that app and improves the user’s experience. 

There are use cases for a simple, secure sharing API in many industries. Organizations such as banking, wealth management, healthcare, insurance, and even an automobile dealer or a school nurse would benefit from this API being used in one of their systems. If an organization ever needs sensitive data to flow from their organization to an end-user, then this API will benefit them.

Let’s highlight the automobile dealer to show how flexible the uses of this API really are. When you buy a car, you need to provide the dealership with some of your personal information including your driver’s license, proof of insurance, and financial information. In the time where most customers expect to be able to do most of their interactions with a business online, and especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic, having a secure, digital way to send this information is essential. So, this API provides that to the automobile dealer by supplying a secure method for customers to send their sensitive information from a mobile app or even a customer portal on the dealership’s website.”

If you read this blog closely, you probably caught the part about our roadmap for 2021. This year we have a lot of great new products and improvements coming to further boost your solution’s secure digital experience. Keep an eye on our website or subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to know about new product announcements, enhancements to our existing products, and more!

“In 2021 we’ll continue down the path of providing our customers and prospects a better and better experience both in terms of how they interact with us and our services, and in the services themselves. There’s an old quote from Socrates that goes something like this: ‘the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.’ For 2021 we are laser focused on increasing security while simultaneously improving customer experience.”

Read more: https://www.wisesayings.com/life-gets-better-quotes/#ixzz6pCHXY4uz

Welcome to the new DataMotion.com.  We invite you to take a tour through the site.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the next generation of DataMotion. We had two primary goals: 1. to create a site that better reflects our position as a leading provider of APIs and pre-built solutions for secure data exchange, and 2. to create a better, more intuitive experience for finding information, and trying or buying our services.

You can now quickly find information about our APIs and pre-built bundles through articles, case studies, how to videos, documentation and libraries. When you’re ready, easily try out our services at no charge via our new customer self-service center. To simplify the buying the experience, we’ve created new service bundles, starting with a free bundle for personal use, to ones designed for individual professionals, teams and large enterprises. And we are showing you what each service costs – right up front.

For our existing customers – no worries – the solutions you are currently running are now a part of one of the bundles.  You might see some with a new name – for example SecureMail is now called secure mailbox and is included in all bundles. When you come to the site to login, you will now see three options: one to go to your Secure Message Portal (SecureMail), one for Direct Secure Messaging (portal) and one to access your self-service Customer Center. Just pick the service you already have and log in like you usually do.  Any questions – just get in touch with your account representative or contact support.

We hope you find the new site easy to access and navigate.  And we’re just getting started.  2021 will bring even more great ways for you to do secure, remote, digital business with your customers and partners.  We look forward to making these available to you in the coming year.  So, stay tuned, sit back, and explore!

As we kick off the new year, we thought it would be good to reflect not only on what we’ve been doing over the last year, but also what we are planning for the DataMotion platform over the coming year. We spent a little time with DataMotion CEO Bob Janacek talking about his vision for DataMotion.  We’d like to share that with you below. Our questions are in bold. The interview has been lightly edited.

As 2019 comes to a close, it seems like a good time to reflect on the progress made this year. Thinking about this, can you describe the major initiatives DataMotion worked on this year, and the impact these have had for customers?

Bob Janacek: Sure. Thanks. We’ve spent many years working with customers in regulated markets like banking, insurance, government and healthcare, addressing their concerns around secure collaboration with their clients and partners. Our secure messaging system is used by many of these organizations to enable easy, secure and compliant communications for employees with their constituents.

That’s our software as a service, which is an end user product. It’s a turnkey solution that customers can implement as is. And what we’ve seen in the last year – really the last couple years – is a shift. These collaborative features that previously were used in a standalone sense, now our customers are asking for them to be integrated. And, they want to do so in the mainstream workflow of how they do business. For instance, many of our customers have a member portal. That’s where they drive their clients’ usage – through their portal and mobile apps. Our customers spend considerable resources on digital transformation and customer experience of their portals and apps. Collaboration was a missing piece. A lot of these portals are read only. For example, they may show a client’s explanation of benefits or bank balance, but they don’t allow them to ask a question or submit supporting documents.  So rather than having a separate email encryption portal where their clients must go to ask questions and exchange sensitive information, our customers want that collaboration to happen seamlessly from within their member portals and apps. This provides a better user experience that’s secure, simple and fast. Security that gets in the way of business processes is typically ignored. But if you can make it melt into the process, so that it’s as easy to use as any other feature, then it can accelerate business and add a lot of value to what companies bring their customers.

So, as you look to the future then for 2020 what changes do you see happening and where and how do you see the company evolving?

Bob Janacek: To meet this need of stitching secure collaboration into our customers’ workflows, DataMotion is investing heavily in our platform as a service. Whereas our traditional products were software as a service or SaaS, the API version of that – the version that could be integrated into customers’ systems – is a platform as a service or PaaS. That’s where we expose APIs and protocols that allow internal systems for customer service, for loan processing, for underwriting – a wide range of systems to participate in the secure exchange of information with their clients. The other end of these connections are often client-facing apps and portals. We’re investing in the APIs and protocols that allow backend systems to participate in the secure exchange of information. We’re also investing in the APIs and methods that allow mobile apps and front-end systems to integrate secure correspondence seamlessly for their members.

Okay, so talk about why it’s so important that the company evolved in this way. This is kind of a pivot or change in direction for DataMotion. What is it that’s driving all of this? You talked a little bit about customers requesting this, but, what’s really behind all of that.

Bob Janacek: A new generation of consumer is interacting with our customers, including millennials and younger ones in generation Z.  These users are tech savvy and expect companies that they do business with to be the same.  They expect mobile apps. They expect smartphone first interfaces. They don’t want to call in and wait 20 minutes listening to music on hold if they can get an answer by typing something digitally in a few seconds. They don’t necessarily want to deal with fax anymore. Or sign paper documents and send them by postal mail or overnight courier. They may not even have postage stamps laying around. They don’t think about those ways of doing business, which a lot of organizations are still built on. So, the younger generations are expecting a capable digital experience for interacting with their suppliers, whether it’s their bank, insurance company, healthcare or a government agency. They know the bar that Apple and Amazon.com created. If you can do everything online, then why go physical. Problem is a lot of the service companies use legacy customer service methods built around fax, phone calls, postal mail and FedEx, which is not the modern world. So, there is a groundswell, really a paradigm shift, in moving from legacy systems to pure digital, or at least supplementing traditional channels with digital ones. The digital experience is smarter, less expensive and faster. It’s secure. It’s auditable. It’s compliant. There’s a lot of benefits to going digital, but companies will need vendors like DataMotion that have the rich toolset to be able to integrate secure digital collaboration into their existing internal and client-facing experiences.

So, part of what is driving this is that they’ve got these existing workflows and they can’t just wholesale throw them out and try something else. It’s more of an evolution for these companies as well?

Bob Janacek: Right, we are very focused on helping our customers and their users, employees and systems work in ways that are most natural to them. It should just work, without rip and replace, and it should be transparent and easy.  If it’s a back-end or legacy system that speaks a certain protocol, we want to be able to speak that protocol. Then that system can remain in place and can participate. If it’s a client-facing portal or mobile app, REST APIs may be the preferred way of integrating secure collaboration. So, by providing a range of methods, APIs and protocols, and enabling all of them to interoperate, we allow a wide range of workflows involving systems, employees and consumers to participate in ways that are most natural to them.

Can you describe in more detail about how this is going to affect the products or services that DataMotion offers, especially as we go into 2020?

Bob Janacek: In 2020, you’re going to see a lot more emphasis on DataMotion’s platform as a service and our developer center that backs that platform as a service. Currently the developer center offers a range of APIs that programmers can access in a self-service manner. They don’t have to contact sales to gain access to it, they can go right to developers.datamotion.com and sign up for access, and immediately start testing out the APIs.

What we’re going to see in 2020 is a broader range of APIs that are made available. I can’t talk about all of them right now. But there’s a lot in store for DataMotion on the platform as a service as it relates to collaboration, security and compliance.

So, you’ll be expanding the different ways, systems and workflows that these organizations will be able to communicate by?

Bob Janacek: It’s really about transparency. It’s about integrating security and compliance into the collaboration process in a transparent way. It’s also about efficiency. If things are embedded tightly in the workflow, then that security and compliance is seamless in the workflow. The efficiency is maximized. Compliance is maximized at the same time. A lot of times you see security get in the way of workflows. It can add extra steps for users, or force processes to use outdated communication tools. Security is also the step that users remove from the process because it can prevent companies from meeting revenue goals – it gets in the way of business processes. By having the DataMotion platform as a service, and a range of very robust APIs and protocols, the security becomes transparent in the process. It’s really a win, win for compliance and customer experience. Organizations’ online processes are secure. And from a business point of view, those business processes drive revenue recognition, and customer satisfaction goes up dramatically.

That leads right into the next question that I had for you, which is about how these organizations are going to benefit from these changes – this new direction that we have been talking about. Being able to be more secure and compliant – and have that all baked into those processes is a clear benefit?

Bob Janacek: Well one of the things about digital transformation and modernization is that it drives costs out of legacy processes. If you look at having to return a document by mail, it has to go through the handling of the mail room, it may get scanned and then an image may get attached to a CRM system. It may need OCR or optical character recognition that often introduces errors into process – especially if it’s handwriting. You know, an eight may look like a zero. That results in bad data that’s put into the system. Now, someone has to correct that. All the steps of handling legacy workflows are costly and error prone. By modernizing not only are you satisfying the expectation of today’s consumer, but you’re also reducing the cost of the organization’s operations, reducing errors and becoming more efficient.  Increases in brand loyalty, and customer retention and acquisition rates also occur, resulting in more profitable lines of business.

DataMotion has been a part of the email encryption industry for a long time. What role do you see email encryption playing in this evolution for DataMotion? 

Bob Janacek: Most email encryption solutions are SaaS offerings – it is a mature solution with a lot of vendors including DataMotion. But now – customers in the highly regulated industries –healthcare, financial services, insurance, and some functions of government – they need something better. The vendors that will excel in the email encryption market are those that have built on a robust platform that allows for integrated functionality which is in demand from these industries. Having that functionality baked into workflows and business processes, is really the next step in the transformation of these companies, customer experiences and their journey into digital transformation. SaaS is fine for many organizations that need ad hoc email encryption for legal and HR departments. But for those that are constantly handling sensitive information as a core business process – you need to evolve with the times. Email encryption offered as a PaaS and baked into the workflow is really where we see the major growth opportunities with these industries.

Every industry and company can face disruptions at some point, and it sounds like that’s what this is. Can you talk about other disruptions that DataMotion has been seeing and what you’re doing to meet these kinds of challenges?

Bob Janacek: Well, it’s really about secure collaboration in a broader sense. Email encryption is one channel. But systems also exchange files; people exchange files. There’s also the need for structured data or electronic forms exchange to be easier for organizations. They have security needs, but then they also have workflow needs as well. There’s a lot of opportunity to modernize legacy methods that have been in place for decades. So, we see secure collaboration involving email, messages, files and forms as ripe for a paradigm shift that strategically integrates them into an organization’s workflow, allowing appropriate systems and business processes to participate, all in a very easy, secure, compliant manner. It’s really bringing all those to the next level.

All right. So, in 2020, what’s your number one goal for DataMotion? If you had to pick just one thing – what would you want to see DataMotion accomplish?

Bob Janacek: The one thing that I’d like to see DataMotion accomplish in 2020, and which is already well underway, is the emphasis of platform as a service allowing developers to easily access and touch our APIs – and integrate them into their solutions. There are many types of solutions that would benefit from secure customer collaboration, include help desk ticketing and customer contact systems, ERP systems, accounting systems, healthcare systems and CRMs.  Besides GDPR, there are many privacy regulations being introduced or taking affect such as the California Consumer Privacy Act. These regulations are affecting companies and vendors – any organization that sends and touches sensitive data, they need to have a way to keep that data secure. The security should not get in the way of the business process, though. It needs to be baked in. There are a lot of opportunities for developers of these solutions to leverage DataMotion’s platform as a service, our APIs and protocols. Using these they can bake in that seamless experience and not only comply with ever-increasing privacy regulations, but also to provide the modern digital experience that their customers expect.

Going past 2020, where do you see DataMotion, and the industry in general going, looking out the next two to five years?

Bob Janacek: We have to continually serve the needs of our customers. Our customers are emphasizing security and compliance, ease of use and superior experiences for their clients. They’re also looking at machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing. So those are areas reaching a level of maturity that we can integrate into the DataMotion platform to benefit our customers. Those things are on our radar to continue our work of increasing efficiency, accelerating business processes, reducing complexity and driving cost out of collaboration.

Sounds like exciting times.

Bob Janacek: It absolutely is.

Two last questions. One is a fun question. What type of music do you have that you’re recommending this year?

Bob Janacek: I’ve been listening to the No Shoes Radio channel on satellite radio lately. There’s a lot of island music on that station. It just transports you to a different place. You know, it’s all about experience. You know that we’re also elevating the experience. But yeah, the islands and palm trees and all that kind of put you in that state of mind that says if you could make something so optimal and get so much enjoyment out of it in the islands, why can’t we bring that enjoyment to your customers use of technology?

Cool. So last question. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that we haven’t covered that you’d like our customers and prospects to know about DataMotion and where we’re going in this coming year.

Bob Janacek: As technology matures, history has shown that it consolidates, and it gets easier and easier to use. And I think that’s where we are in the curve of our offering. Whereas previously, for example, there were vendors for encrypted email, there were file transfer vendors for people and for systems, and for electronic forms.

They are now converging into a secure collaboration platform where you can emphasize any of those – email, files or forms – they all exchange. Now any system, app or process can participate in any of them with one common set of security, compliance, governance and tracking tools. You have a consistent view of all your critical information exchanges. Previously, you had multiple vendors, an uneven security footprint, uneven compliance, complexities of security patch management. We offer a very high bar for security, compliance and tracking, while also providing the agility needed to really get digital transformation and collaboration right. In addition, as your processes modernize and new ones are formed, you want a platform that has enough depth that you don’t outgrow it. So that’s technology, you know, maturing, converging and making collaboration a strategic asset in a CIO’s toolbox – allowing them to enable easy, secure communication and collaboration between their wide range of systems, employees, customers and business partners.