It seemed so straightforward. The marketers at Genworth Financial Wealth Management wanted to launch a new project and hired an outside consultant to help. Three months into the contract, the consultant requested some data about Genworth's project plans. But when Genworth's marketers twice tried to upload the data, nothing happened. So they called the company's tech support for help--the first time they'd alerted IT to what they'd considered a pure marketing project.
It turned out the consultancy was trying to use a cloud-based tool for collaboration. And Genworth's security controls automatically blocked any such upload to the public cloud. The failed transfers merely meant that the block was working correctly.
"It was the kind of thing that could have led to a screaming match between the CIO and the CMO," says John Murray, CIO of Genworth Financial Wealth Management, a unit of the Fortune 500 parent company Genworth Financial.
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