Avoid Data Breaches With a Secure Inner Perimeter Around Your Digital Assets

Your secure content communication channel must control every file saved and retrieved from every enterprise content repository to provide complete protection against a breach. Global data security, governance, and visibility require uniform access control, policy enforcement and monitoring of all content repositories across the extended enterprise. Unfortunately, large global organizations have a lot of sensitive content distributed across many disparate locations, including enterprise applications, ECM systems, network file shares and cloud storage services to name a few. Complex, varied storage locations increase the risk that sensitive information will leak undetected.

CISOs must enable secure content communication 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. This blog series explores these trade-offs and offers six guiding principles for creating a secure content sharing channel that enables work across the extended enterprise and protects your most sensitive digital assets.

In my last blog post, I discussed the need for organizations to eliminate shadow IT with a secure communication channel that shares sensitive content efficiently. Today, I’ll discuss how CISOs can protect their organizations from a breach once they control every file saved and retrieved from every enterprise content repository.

If You Can’t Consolidate Repositories, Consolidate Content Access Instead

The bad news is that the simplest solution to this problem—consolidating all enterprise content into a single repository—is not feasible for most organizations. Existing, distributed content stores are often too integrated into existing workflows and too expensive to migrate. Enterprise applications often require content in specific data formats. Regulatory requirements, such as national or regional data sovereignty rules, may prohibit the consolidation of content across international boundaries. And, highly sensitive content should be segregated to implement tighter security, such as multi-factor authentication. The good news is that you don’t need to consolidate content physically. You just need to consolidate it virtually through metadata and controls to unify content access, security, governance, and visibility.

Ensure All Content is Shared Securely With Content Repository Connectors

By deploying connectors to content repositories that intercept, monitor, and manage storage and retrieval requests, you can create a secure inner perimeter around your most valuable digital assets that complements the secure external perimeter created by plugins to end user sharing applications. As files pass through this perimeter, granular permissions and detailed content scans can ensure that only authorized files are retrieved and sent externally, and only safe files are received and stored internally. Nothing falls through the cracks.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how CISOs can prevent compliance failures with complete auditability. To demonstrate compliance with industry regulations and standards, organizations must have complete auditability of all content, content sharing, and all content-related systems, policies, and procedures.

To learn more about protecting your organization from a data breach, schedule a custom demo of Kiteworks today.

Additional Resources

• Glossary Security Risk Management [Information Risk & Assessment]
• Blog Post HIPAA Compliant
• Blog Post HIPAA Security Rule Safeguards
• Glossary Why Cybersecurity Risk Management Matters
• Blog Post Data Compliance