049: The Hyland Cloud: Castle-Like Security Suited for Royalty

Steve Glisky: 

Steve Glisky:

Welcome to the Paperless Productivity podcast, where we have experts give you the insights, knowhow and resources to help you transform your workplace from paper to digital, while making your work life better at the same time. 

Amanda Pfriem:

Thanks for joining us. My name is Steve Glisky, your host, and today I’m very excited about our topic, the Hyland Cloud. In this episode, we’re going to cover specific reasons why so many organizations are moving to the Cloud as well as steps required for getting started. With me, to help educate us on all things Cloud is our special guest from Hyland Software, Amanda Pfriem who is Hyland’s Cloud Business Consultant. Welcome Amanda.

Steve Glisky:

Thank you. Happy to be on.

Amanda Pfriem:

Great. Hey Amanda, many customers listening in have an on-premise type implementation of OnBase. Why should organizations like these consider moving to the Hyland Cloud?

Amanda Pfriem:

That is a great question. There are many reasons, and those will be different and stronger, I should say for various organizations, but across the board, the value that every customer gets by moving to the Hyland Cloud is the expertise and scale and peace of mind. So, when a customer moves to the Hyland Cloud, they pass on a lot of responsibility that they no longer need to stress over, research, worry about over to the Hyland Cloud team. And the big difference is between maybe another vendor, say a public Cloud, you’re passing it over to experts that have been doing this since 2004. And every little layer that makes up the Hyland Cloud is an area of their expertise.

Amanda Pfriem:

So for example, network security, those individuals understand network security specifically for Hyland products, originally for OnBase. And that’s what they do every day, day in and day out. They’re making sure that we’re using the best of breed tools and technologies, methodologies, monitoring the network, making sure it’s locked down and then of course, researching for the future to make sure that that is honed in to last year over year, making the offering better and better. And there’s all individual teams and team members that are focused in the various areas. So a big hitter is of course that expertise. And especially when it comes to security. It’s becoming ever more important year over year to have a more secure solution, especially in the Cloud. And that’s a big piece. And then of course the peace of mind of passing it over to those experts.

Steve Glisky:

So, what we like to think is that we want businesses to focus on what they’re in business for, and this allows you to further do that. OnBase helps you get there and then passing it over to the Hyland Cloud helps you get through even more. You can focus on what you should be focusing on really. So really helps you do that when you’re no longer stressing over infrastructure, patching, upgrade, testing, monitoring, all of those individual pieces. There’s a lot to it, but I would just summarize it’s that scale that we can reach at Hyland and the expertise that we have in those areas. So ultimately giving customers peace of mind and the ability to focus on other things.

Amanda Pfriem:

Makes a lot of sense, Amanda. We hear so many stories about data breaches, like Equifax, ransomware attacks, taking customers down for extended period of time. I think it’s fair to say that very few organizations have the capacity to properly administrate a system to protect against cyber-attacks. And in light of this, how does Hyland approach security?

Amanda Pfriem:

Great topic. And ultimately that’s at the top of our list. And you’re right, at the end of the day, there’s going to be a small percentage of organizations that maybe do have that know how to grow. The majority are not going to be able to reach that scale. And you want the peace of mind that you’re not the next Equifax, right? You’re not stressing over those pieces. So security’s huge.

Amanda Pfriem:

We could talk about security for literally days, weeks, months, but to put it down to a very high level approach, we use the defense in-depth approach, which is also referred to as the castle approach. So when you think about both of those, think about layers. So in my castle approach, cheesy metaphor, if you think about an intruder going into enemy territory and they need to get across all these different barriers. So you have a ring of fire, you have a moat, a drawbridge, archers that are shooting arrows at the intruder, a thick door that you need to get through. All of those present obstacles that are really challenging, making it weaker and weaker and arguably impossible to get to the center. Same deal when it comes to the Cloud and the defense in-depth castle approach we use.

Amanda Pfriem:

At the outer layer. We have, again, back to those teams that I mentioned that are hyper-focused in individual areas. We have a governance risk and compliance team that works in conjunction with our leadership. And they make sure that our policies and procedures are being adhered to, and that our policies and procedures are strong and being analyzed every year, they need to be updated. Everyone’s reading them, trained on them, putting them into place. The physical layer, it’s a bit shared across our data centers and, at Hyland, any physical aspect of security, we want to make sure that we’re using fire suppression. We’re using things like redundant power, key cards, video surveillance, to name a few examples of physical security.

Amanda Pfriem:

And then you have these other layers where again, it goes back to those teams that are really focused on securing them. So we have the perimeter, we have the internal network, as I mentioned at the beginning, a network security team, a host layer. At the application layer, it’s another layer that’s a little bit closer, of course, to your solution. And that’s an interesting one, because it’s a bit shared where we do things on our side from the Hyland Cloud perspective. But those OnBase customers out there might be thinking like, “Hey, we already do stuff for security.” That doesn’t change. So OnBase is built to be secure within the software. You still get those layers at the application layer and we even add more. So, when customers move to the Cloud, we automatically give them, at no cost, from a migration perspective, encrypted disk groups and encrypted alpha keywords. So that’s that further layer of protection.

Steve Glisky:

Then finally at the data layer, everything that gets pulled into the Hyland Cloud is encrypted. Again, I could go on longer. That’s just an overview of how we approach security in the Cloud and just wanted to call out to our customers listening, if you need anything to review from a security perspective, if you’re considering moving to the Cloud, we have plenty of documentation that we can share, from penetration test reports to, we have a completed SIG, and we also are registered with C-STAR. We just completed a new assessment this year, actually. We have a fresh new completed assessment that’s on the web that you can go ahead and pull down for some light reading and learn even more about our security.

Amanda Pfriem:

Excellent. Great to know. So what customers really get, and you say this with the Hyland Cloud is peace of mind knowing that their system is, system and data is safeguarded. I appreciate that. So, tell me what happens when a customer moves to the Cloud. Do they still pay maintenance?

Amanda Pfriem:

That’s a good question again. So customers that move to the Hyland Cloud become SaaS customers. So, the answer is sort of yes and no. You have that same support. It’s just pulled into that SaaS beat. And that really is another benefit that I probably should have mentioned when you asked that initial question of moving to the Cloud, because everything gets rolled up into that single SaaS line item. And when I say everything, I mean not only the piece of support, you still get the support. You have access to your environment of course, but you also have the additional pieces of true SaaS. You no longer need to worry about patching as I mentioned.

Steve Glisky:

Upgrades, the baseline move to a new release is included. All of that is wrapped up into that single SaaS line item, which helps a lot of our customers we hear from a budgeting perspective. You no longer need to puzzle over budget or say, “Hey, we only have time and revenue aside for this particular project, but we can’t do that one.” With this, you know everything is wrapped up into that single SaaS line item, so it really simplifies things as well for our Cloud customers.

Amanda Pfriem:

Fantastic. So the Hyland Cloud simplifies that whole budgeting process with a single subscription cost. That’s terrific. So if customers interested, how did they get moving on this?

Amanda Pfriem:

So the first thing, I would reach out to your account manager and they can get the Hyland team looped in and help you through to understand the process of what it will be to actually migrate, which we have this process honed in to the degree that we make it the least disruptive for a customer move to the Cloud. I do want to call that out and your account manager, account executive, can help you get the information in more depth on that, by doing a call out, but it’s least disruptive in that the process is created so you can keep using your on-premise environment without disruption until the very end of the process. But really, once you get looped in with your team, do an initial review, the loop in the Hyland team as needed, do a review of your system. One thing that we really want to make sure is part of the process is to make sure that you are fully aware of any experience changes. There are some slight differences in experience of course, into the Cloud.

Steve Glisky:

So we want to make sure you’re aware of those, review your solution module to make sure that everything is going to operate as you expect it to. And then sooner than later, you’ll be up in the Cloud. So I would say, in summary, reach out to your account manager and they can get the process rolling. And again, part of that process is making sure you’re fully informed of what the actual project will look like, and then any differences in experiences. And of course, get you any materials as you need to review on your end to make that decision.

Amanda Pfriem:

Got it. So customers really need to do their own due diligence to see if making that move to the Cloud makes sense for their situation and the best way to get started is, make that call and they’re going to do an assessment and give them an estimate and even an ROI study. Is that right, Amanda?

Steve Glisky:

Exactly. Yes. That’s a huge component in helping make that call and understand, are we going to get the value out of this move? And we actually have an entire team at Hyland that focuses on helping customers make that call and they’ll do a review for you, can update the numbers that are unique to your business and show you what the difference would be versus staying status quo, another option or moving of course, to the Hyland Cloud. So great point there, that’s certainly something that we can do in helping make that call, make that decision.

Steve Glisky:

Great. And then the costs may need to go through the budgeting process. So that could take some time. So if you’re interested, they should get started now to get all that information. So fantastic. That is going to be the final question for today.

Amanda, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a wonderful discussion. And for our listeners, we appreciate you downloading this podcast. Thank you and have a great day.

Thanks again for joining us on this podcast, to learn more about ImageSoft, please visit nathana12.sg-host.com. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to Paperless Productivity, where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time. 

Steve Glisky: