4 Collaboration Tricks that Will Haunt You
Trick or Treat? Collaboration platforms like SharePoint, Office 365, file shares, Teams, Dropbox, Box and Slack have made it easier for users to collaborate yielding increased communication and productivity across the enterprise. But with them comes content – a lot of it. In fact, the volume of business data worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years. While content is king, don’t be made a fool by keeping collaboration and data security unchecked. Here are four collaboration tricks that you should avoid year-round.
Night Terrors
Among the creatures that lurk in the dark there may be an Admin perusing your collaboration sites in the midnight hour. Like a phantom, the Anonymous Admin likes to browse through sensitive Board only documents under the cover of night. While site and document access are regularly audited, he knows multiple people have Admin access to the account and believes his actions are untraceable.
The facts:
- 28% of all cyber attacks involve insiders with legitimate access to information.
- 68% of breaches took months or longer to discover – especially when they involve legitimate access.
A Taste for Data
Vampires do exist – in the workplace that is. They bleed your company of its customer data, confidential information and IP – the lifeblood of any organization. Take the once dedicated employee who accepted a job offer with a competitor that pays better and has a shorter commute. She’ll be moving on in two weeks, but not until she downloads copies of her clients, internal communications on planned product improvements, and anything else that will help her succeed at her new company.
The facts:
- Cyber espionage was a motive for 44% of public sector breaches.
- Highly sensitive research is also at risk with 20% of education attacks motivated by espionage.
- Almost half (47%) of manufacturing breaches involved the theft of intellectual property to gain competitive advantage.
Operating in the Shadows
A bit like ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ these users often battle themselves. They strive to do the right thing and follow governance policies, but sometimes, against their better selves, take a few shortcuts. For example, uploading a sensitive document to a private Box account to quickly share it with a vendor. The user knows he probably shouldn’t do it, it’s against company policy after all. But he’s under a deadline and what’s the real harm sharing data with a trusted vendor anyhow – even if it’s in the IT shadows?
The facts:
- By 2020, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their Shadow IT resources.
- Data loss and downtime from Shadow IT cost a total of $1.7 Trillion each year.
Caverns of Data Stores
Every enterprise has a skeleton or two (or 200) in their cavernous digital closets. Unstructured content abounds in files shares, SharePoint, Office 365 and other collaboration sites. With an average of 508 applications in use within an enterprise, where is your sensitive and regulated content? Is it secured properly? Who has access to it? Content skeletons can put your company at serious risk.
The facts:
- Gartner estimates over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured.
- 71% of enterprises struggle to manage and protect unstructured data.
6 Steps to Turn Collaboration Tricks into Treats
How can you avoid these common mistakes and keep your data secure without hampering collaboration or losing sleep? Here are four simple steps:
- Clean-out the skeletons in your digital closets. Leverage artificial intelligence powered automation to scan systems to identify where sensitive information lives and automatically secure it before it comes back to haunt you.
- Make your workplace truly intelligent. Use both content and context to augment security depending on parameters such as the document sensitivity, role, time of day, location, and device to determine if content can be accessed and what can be done with it.
- Take the onus off users. Don’t bog users down with complex rules around data collaboration and sharing. Take advantage of technology that can apply restrictions such as preventing printing, emailing or saving of sensitive content.
- based on the document sensitivity to prevent unwanted actions and consequences.
- Monitor sensitive data so you can see who has accessed it and how it has been used or shared to provide a full audit trail. Be sure to have a process in place to notify managers and stakeholders of potential violations.
And finally, find a Friendly Ghost. Technology is your friend when reining in collaboration tricks. Learn how Security Sheriff watches over your enterprise data, improves your data security and makes the intelligent workplace a reality.
