IntraLinks® has just announced the general availability of IntraLinks Courier™, the only enterprise-grade solution for ad-hoc information sharing. We designed IntraLinks Courier to enable organizations to extend important enterprise security and compliance controls to more frequent, less formal communications in which information is shared with business partners and customers outside the firewall. It’s as simple to use as email, and allows business users to easily share files as large as 6 GB. Try it for yourself by signing up for a free trial.

An unseasonably wintery and very cold London played host on the 30th November to the Business Cloud Summit 2010, sponsored this year by, amongst others, IntraLinks, Microsoft, CSC, NetSuite, RightNow and Success Factors and attended by several hundred senior IT professionals, analysts and commentators drawn from a broad base of industries, the public sector, media and professional bodies.

This is the second year of the summit, one of the largest vendor independent cloud gatherings in the UK, a forum that serves the purpose of inter-industry networking as much as it reports out trends and discusses issues and, of course, provides a showcase for the propositions of the leading software authors and service providers in the space.

This is the next in a series of guest blog posts by IntraLinks’ collaborators, partners, and vendors. Andreas Grabner is Sr. Architect and Technology Strategist at dynaTrace. dynaTrace is a technology leader in application performance management (APM). IntraLinks selected dynaTrace Continuous Application Performance Management to improve the operation of IntraLinks’ platform during the production lifecycle in September of 2009.

The Cloud has become the hot topic in the past year, with many major technology leaders (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce.com, etc.) extensively promoting public cloud services. What is equally interesting is the growth of the so-called “private cloud”: whether large enterprises transitioning their datacenter infrastructure to cloud-based paradigms; or solution providers using their own cloud-based platforms to provide solutions more efficiently.

Analyst conferences promise to be engaging, enlightening and actionable. I’m pleased to report that Forrester’s recent IT Forum 2010 in Las Vegas met those expectations. There was a wide range of sessions for various roles including CIOs, enterprise architects, application development professionals and technology marketers. The event’s core themes appeared to be cloud-based computing, community and social computing, and using technology to become more customer-centric.

There’s no doubt that cloud-based computing, including software-as-a-service, will continue to grow in popularity. Solutions in the public cloud have relatively low start-up costs, are available on-demand and are highly scalable. The conference offered insights for developing private clouds to operate proprietary applications. This trend is inevitable but will require years for organizations to develop clouds that match the level of accessibility, security, support and performance offered by public ones. This is due to the singular focus of cloud-based vendors on these operational parameters. Although large organizations will continue to use solutions in public clouds, they will bring their own applications to private clouds.

At the end of April, IntraLinks attended Infosecurity Europe, Europe’s largest information security event. Celebrating its 15th year, Infosecurity Europe attracted over 12,000 information security professionals to Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London, where delegates gathered to discuss the most pressing information security issues and attend a variety of education sessions hosted by international speakers and industry experts.

With over 300 exhibitors, Infosecurity Europe provided the perfect opportunity to showcase new and innovative services to top security professionals across Europe. IntraLinks was there to showcase IntraLinks Courier, a secure, efficient and cost effective solution to streamline ad-hoc large file transfers. IntraLinks Courier seamlessly integrates with company email systems or can be used as a desktop application or via a web-based browser, introducing unmatched security to help business users securely exchange large files while maintaining compliance with requirements that govern their businesses.