Safe4 to present at Society of Will Writers conference

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Safe4 will be opening the Society of Will Writers annual conference in Redditch on Monday 5 October, with a presentation focussing on the Digital Legacy, and how it can be captured and preserved for future generations. The conference will also mark the official launch of the Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault, designed to enable will writers to help their clients to ensure that their inheritance plans are set up in such a way that probate becomes faster and more efficient, and that a wide range of other information is captured and made available to future generations.

Since inception in 2010, Safe4 has become established as one of the most secure sites on the internet. Using Safe4 to manage personal information will give the clients of the Society’s members a unique facility to hold confidential documents and other records of their lives. The service will thus allow the preservation of the Digital Legacy as well as giving the executors of the estate access to all of the information they will need for probate.

Using Safe4’s UK-based data centres accredited to the ISO 27001 security standard provides an ideal basis for handling such personal and sensitive information in a way that gives confidence to the will writer, the executor, and most importantly – the client.

Ben Martin

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Ben Martin is one of the founding directors of Safe4 Information Management

Our “Digital Afterlife” … what will we leave behind?

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Some recent blog posts on the Safe4 website have highlighted the importance of the Digital Legacy – to a great extent this has concentrated on the quantitative aspects of the estate that we will all leave behind. One of the key duties of an executor is to ensure that the value of all assets is taken into account when determining the estate of a deceased testator. This is made much easier when all of the necessary information is in one place, and immediately accessible.

Rightly, the main focus of this exercise is to establish how many, how much, and other questions for which the answer is a number. Using the Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault will dramatically simplify this activity, and reduce both the time it takes (probate will be shortened by as much as 4 months, according to the Society of Will Writers) and lessen the risk of missing either assets or potential beneficiaries. The vault can also be used, however, to deal with other less easily identified qualitative issues that address the question: how do we want to be remembered?

Whilst many of the things that are important to us during our lives can be represented in the form of a computer file – favourite recipes, photographs, music, family videos – we are all constantly generating content on an ever-increasing range of online systems using everyday devices such as smartphones and tablets. Email and text messages, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Skype, and a host of other online services hold information about us, and importantly say something about who we are. This will be of great value to those who are left behind, and can so easily be lost if appropriate steps are not taken to ensure that it will be made available.

The Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault has been set up to allow the ability to access the information held in all of these systems to be captured so that it can become part of our Digital Legacy, enabling us to be confident that future generations will be able to remember us in the way that we wish.

What is the Digital Legacy, and how can it be captured?

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Almost all of us now use electronic systems to help to manage different aspects of our lives. Many of these are online, and use services based in what is known as “The Cloud”. Safe4 is a classic example of this, and uses the Cloud to good effect to make sharing and managing documents online possible with complete security.

But the range of online services has grown exponentially in the last decade. Email is comparatively long-established, but a host of facilities including social media, online purchasing and exchange systems, and even gambling services have mushroomed in recent times. Each of these will contain information about us, and many may actually hold cash balances that should form part of our estate. Even the everyday devices that we use to capture information without thinking – mobile phones and tablets – will be valuable sources of our personal histories after we die.

Inheritance planning services have for many years handled the more formal aspects of dealing with an estate, but they are not able to capture and manage the digital lives that almost all of us are now creating. To meet this need, Safe4 have created the Digital Inheritance Vault in conjunction with the Society of Will Writers as a means of ensuring that the electronic existence of each of us can be held securely and passed on to future generations.

The Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault is being formally launched at the Society of Will Writers annual conference at Redditch on 5 and 6 October. For more information please contact us. We can help you to offer a unique service to your clients.

Safe4 Digital Inheritance Vault to launch at Conference

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In conjunction with the Society of Will Writers, Safe4 have created a Digital Inheritance Vault to be launched at the Society’s annual conference on 5 and 6 October 2015 in Redditch, Worcestershire. The Vault will be available to members of the Society, who provide an extensive range of inheritance planning services to their clients: wills, trusts, deeds, lasting powers of attorney, and of course probate.

But in addition to securely holding all of the information needed for probate, the Vault will be offered to members’ clients to store many other vital documents. Financial records, certificates, insurance policies, identity documents and a host of other critical pieces of information – including funeral plans and wishes – can be stored in a client’s Vault.

The Digital Inheritance Vault can also be used to pass on many treasured family memories that might otherwise be lost after probate has been completed. Family photographs, favourite recipes, videos, music, and a host of other items will be valued by future generations if they are preserved and made available.

One of the most important benefits of using the Vault will be to address an area that has only recently emerged as a significant issue – the Digital Legacy. This will be dealt with in greater detail in a separate post, but what happens to email accounts, and personal information stored in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, eBay and similar online systems after somebody dies?

Allied to all of this, of course, is the overwhelming need for security. Safe4 has consistently placed a premium on maximising security since the company was launched in 2010, and is now independently recognised as being among safest 1% of sites on the internet. Of vital importance when the nature of information stored in a Digital Inheritance Vault is considered.

Dropbox suffers recent outage – but Safe4 scores another month of 100% availability

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Dropbox users may have experienced some difficulty and inconvenience following their recent outage. However, Safe4 achieved another month of 100% availability in August. With the exception of very brief periods of pre-planned server maintenance, Safe4 has provided customers with continuous service for nearly 5 years.

Using UK-based data centres that are accredited to the ISO 27001 security standard, Safe4 offers exceptional levels of availability and confidentiality. There are now Safe4 users in many different parts of the world who are enjoying these benefits – if you would like more information on how Safe4 can assist your business, please contact us. We will be delighted to hear from you.

Massive losses as criminals target UK lawyers’ insecure transactions

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Unsurprisingly, more evidence is emerging all the time of fraud perpetrated by criminal gangs against law firms who do not manage transactions involving financial transfers securely. This article, published in The Times on Friday 4 September, highlights some of the causes.

As ever, one of the root causes is the use of email to transfer confidential information. Law firms should be insisting that their clients do not allow any sensitive or potentially high-risk information to be carried by email. The article referred to above highlights yet another instance of theft through email penetration. However, 70% of UK law firms still use email to communicate confidential information, risking their not only clients’ funds but also potentially their own existence.

Safe4 have gone to great lengths to provide a service which offers completely confidential transfer and storage of information. As well as being SRA-compliant, all Safe4 information is held in UK-based data centres that are accredited to the ISO 27001 security standard.

If you would like more detail on how Safe4 can assist with the secure handling of critical information, please contact us. We will be delighted to speak with you.

A real heart stopping lesson about data security

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I imagine the very recent news that customer data has reportedly been stolen from Ashley Madison, a dating website, will send a few hearts fluttering and pulses racing.

Without wishing to pass judgement on the company or people who use it, how much longer will it take for all manner of organisations to realise they have to take data security seriously? Regardless of what Ashley Madison actually does and if the reports are true about data being stolen, they will rue the fact that they have not paid more attention to this issue.

Not taking data security seriously is asking for trouble and is as certain to limit the future of a business as would be mistreating customers in any way.

For anyone looking into this issue for the first time it is important to be aware that ISO 27000 is a family of standards that helps organisations keep information secure. These standards help manage the security of customer information, financial data, intellectual property, employee details and other information entrusted to them by third parties.

Safe-4 uses a UK-based data centre accredited to ISO/IEC 27001, the best-known component in the family of standards providing requirements for an information security management system (ISMS) which is an exacting and systematic approach to managing sensitive company information so that it remains secure.

It does not matter if a business is large, medium or small in size; using these standards and working with other businesses that also use them will help companies in any sector keep highly sensitive information secure.

Paul Stallard May 15

Paul D Stallard – Hurndall-Stallard Associates – July 2015

Paul Stallard is an independent corporate communications consultant, and advises clients on matters relating to information security and other business-critical issues.