Six Principles for Securing Sensitive Enterprise Content in a Hyper-connected World
To succeed in today’s hyper-connected world, businesses, governments and NGOs must enable easy online collaboration across the extended enterprise. Employees, suppliers, partners, investors, customers, doctors, patients, constituents and other stakeholders expect smooth online workflows enabled by simple, easy sharing of digital content—even when that information is highly confidential.
- Hospitals must provide lab results to doctors and patients directly over the Web
- Financial institutions must offer investors digital account statements and contracts
- Law Firms must share case information with outside counsel and clients
- Insurance companies must provide claim details to agents and policy holders
- Government agencies and contractors expect to share RFPs, contracts, and plans by email
- Global manufacturers share product designs and proprietary IP across international borders
While Employees and Their Partners Expect Data Privacy, Regulators Require It
Alongside these new requirements of transparency and immediacy are heightened concerns of privacy and security. The conflicting demands to both provide and protect this shared, sensitive information has led to a surge in regulatory compliance requirements, such as HIPAA, FISMA, 23 NYCRR 500, PCI and GDPR. While competitive organizations must provide easy online access to account statements, contracts, policies, health records, product designs and the like, they must also secure this highly sensitive data against unauthorized use and theft.
Balance Data Protection With the Overwhelming Need to Share It
CISOs must enable secure online collaboration that balances the protection of sensitive content with the overwhelming need to share it, easing access while preventing breaches, ensuring privacy alongside transparency, and adhering to complex regulations without getting in the way of efficient communication. Each trade-off entails risks. These trade-offs require organizations to establish a secure content sharing channel that enables work across the extended enterprise and protects your most sensitive digital assets.
In this blog series, I’ll explore ways for organizations to properly manage the trade-offs between protecting sensitive content with the overwhelming need to share it. Future installments will explore the following six guiding principles:
- Visibility – begin with the end in mind through total visibility to all activity across your secure content sharing channel, including a CISO Dashboard that provides a complete, real-time audit trail of all shared content
- Security – prevent breaches while enabling workflows by implementing complex access rights and privileges across many user roles, including security integrations that allow consolidated access management through single sign-on and a directory service
- Confidentiality – balance privacy with transparency with data encryption in motion and at rest; the more granular the governance, the greater your ability to enforce confidentiality and strike the right balance between privacy and transparency
- Simplicity – eliminate shadow IT by providing simple secure file sharing, a secure communication channel for sharing sensitive content that is also incredibly simply and easy to use; simplicity is just as important as security
- Uniformity – ensure nothing falls through the cracks with enterprise content access, connectors to content repositories that intercept, monitor, and manage file storage and retrieval requests; complex, varied storage locations increase the risk that sensitive information will leak undetected
- Auditability – prevent regulatory compliance failures with complete auditability of all content, all content sharing, and all content-related systems, policies, and procedures.
In the next post, I’ll explore the benefit of seeing every exchange of sensitive content that occurs between your employees and your stakeholders, including customers, vendors, and partners. In short, security, privacy, transparency, governance and compliance all rely on visibility. If you can’t see it, you can’t defend it.
To learn more about how organizations can properly manage the trade-offs between protecting sensitive content with the overwhelming need to share it, schedule a custom demo of Kiteworks today.
Frequently Asked Questions
Third-party risk management is a strategy that organizations implement to identify, assess, and mitigate risks associated with their interactions with third-party vendors, suppliers, or partners. These risks can range from data breaches and security threats to compliance issues and operational disruptions. The process typically involves conducting due diligence before engaging with a third party, continuously monitoring the third party’s activities and performance, and implementing controls to manage identified risks. The goal is to ensure that the third party’s actions or failures do not negatively impact the organization’s operations, reputation, or legal obligations.
Third-party risk management is crucial because it helps to identify, assess, and mitigate the risks associated with third-party relationships. This can include cybersecurity threats, compliance issues, operational risks, and reputational damage.
Policy controls are essential in third-party risk management as they establish clear expectations for third-party behavior, data handling, and security practices. They help mitigate the risk of security incidents by defining acceptable actions, and ensure third parties comply with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards. Further, policy controls provide a foundation for monitoring third-party activities and enforcing compliance, allowing the organization to take appropriate action in case of policy violations. Thus, policy controls serve as a critical framework for managing third-party risks effectively.
Audit logs are integral to third-party risk management as they offer a comprehensive record of all third-party activities within your systems. They aid in identifying potential risks by highlighting unusual or suspicious activities, serve as a crucial resource during incident response and forensic investigations, and help ensure regulatory compliance by providing proof of effective security measures and third-party monitoring. In addition, they foster a culture of accountability and transparency among third parties, deterring malicious activities and encouraging adherence to security policies.
Kiteworks helps with third-party risk management by providing a secure platform for sharing and managing sensitive content. The platform is designed to control, track, and secure sensitive content that moves within, into, and out of an organization, significantly improving risk management. Kiteworks also provides two levels of email encryption, Enterprise and Email Protection Gateway (EPG), to secure sensitive email communications. This helps to protect against third-party risks associated with email communication.
Additional Resources
- Glossary What is Security Risk Management?
- Blog Post What are the Most Secure File Sharing Options for Enterprise & Compliance?
- Blog Post What is Data Sovereignty?
- Blog Post A Guide to Information Security Governance
- Blog Post Using Virtual Data Rooms for Secure File Sharing – Virtual
Don’t want to wait? Download the eBook now!
The Risky Business of Online Collaboration