Protect Your IP With Complete Visibility Into Every Sensitive File Exchange
What if you could see every exchange of sensitive content between your organization and your customers, your vendors, your partners, your attorneys, your investors, and all other external parties? Where is it going to? Where is it coming from? Who is sending it? Who is receiving it? How sensitive is it? Is it infected? What if you had a CISO Dashboard that could analyze those communications along relevant dimensions, such as content sensitivity, origin and destination, time of day, and file type. What if you could implement dynamic security and governance policies based on that information, such as blocking a transfer of unusually sensitive information to a specific country by a specific user at a specific time of day? Security, privacy, transparency, governance and compliance all rely on visibility. If you don’t measure it, then you can’t manage it. Therefore, you should begin with the end in mind: total visibility to all activity across your secure content sharing channel, including a complete, real-time audit trail of all shared content that can be recorded, aggregated, sliced, diced and archived.
Take Back Control of Your Data With Vendor Risk Management
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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. 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 explored the need for CISOs to provide smooth online workflows enabled by simple, easy sharing of digital content, even when that information is highly confidential. Today, I’ll discuss how CISOs can protect their most prized digital assets by controlling and monitoring every file that enters or leaves their firm.
Balancing Content Accessibility with Security and Governance is Easier Said Than Done
The simplest way to accomplish total visibility would be to force all sensitive content communications through a single user application attached to a single content repository, e.g., a consolidated private cloud storage and file sharing service. Then, you’d have a single point of data collection. Unfortunately, people don’t work this way. They use email, web browsers, mobile apps and even SFTP clients to exchange sensitive content. And, that content gets stored all over the place in local drives, network file servers, enterprise applications, ECM systems and cloud storage services. Moreover, the most sensitive content will likely be segregated and maintained on premise. While some consolidation of user sharing applications and enterprise storage locations is certainly beneficial, it will always be limited in any reasonably large, complex organization.
Achieve Complete Visibility With a Connection to Every Data Source and Endpoint
Total visibility to all shared sensitive content is clearly much easier said than done. However, it is not simply an aspiration. With rigorous data privacy laws like HIPAA and GDPR, it’s a requirement. In the real world, total visibility entails tapping into all the endpoints where users share content, as well as all the locations where content is stored. Whatever the final system architecture, an essential requirement of your secure content sharing channel will be a connection to every content repository and sharing application that monitors and governs each request to save, retrieve, send or receive a file. Every missing connection will be a blind spot that enables a potential breach.
In the next post, I’ll explore the pitfalls associated with providing simple, seamless access to content. Given the variety of applications and user workflows, providing simple access is a very complex challenge and securing authorized access is just the first step.
To learn more about how you can protect your most prized digital assets by controlling and monitoring every file that enters or leaves your organization, 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
- Blog Post DLP Infrastructure
- Blog Post Eliminate Shadow IT with Secure Content Access that Doesn’t Slow Workflows
- Blog Post Six Principles for Securing Sensitive Enterprise Content in a Hyper-Connected World
- Blog Post Private Content Networks
- Blog Post New Report Benchmarks Privacy And Compliance Risks Related to Sensitive Content Communications