Secure and Empower Employee Workflows With Enterprise Application Plugins

There’s a fine line between protecting sensitive information from data leaks and making that information easy to share with trusted partners. Make the process too difficult for employees, and they will find unauthorized (read: unsecure) workarounds to get their jobs down. Make it too easy, and PII, PHI, and IP is bound to fall into the wrong hands, leading to a data breach and/or compliance violation. Either way, when it comes to securing third-party workflows, users will always be the weakest link.

Third-party workflow threats have a common theme: a user is the actor, and a file is the agent. Complete protection requires a defense that spans the full breadth of the associated threat surface: the collective paths of all files entering and exiting your organization. A comprehensive defense entails securing, monitoring, and managing all third-party workflows, including secure email, SFTP, and secure file sharing, among others.

In my last blog post, I discussed protecting your external workflows by restricting the number of third-party communication apps allowed in your organization and securing those authorized apps to ensure your confidential information is protected at all times. Building upon this topic, today I’ll discuss the importance of making the apps you’ve selected and secured easy for employees to use without sacrificing security or compliance.

Get Out of Your Employees’ Way With Enterprise Application Plugins

Applications like Salesforce, Office 365, and Oracle are critical to employee workflows. CISOs may find a more secure alternative to these applications but only at the expense of disrupting employee workflows. Instead, CISOs can partner with development teams to bake security and compliance capabilities into these and other applications via enterprise application plugins. The shared goal is to make security and compliance seamless with employee workflows. This way, users work in the applications they use all day, every day, while security and privacy policies on the back end ensure confidential information stays private. Ultimately, the less CISOs disrupt employee workflows with new applications and extra steps, the more likely employees are to adopt the preferred method for sharing send sensitive content.

If a CISO Dashboard lets you see every file entering and leaving the organization, like a security camera that lets you see every person entering and exiting a building, enterprise application plugins let you secure all of your organization’s exits and make them super easy to find. Plugins should make sending, receiving, saving, and retrieving files very simple. If they don’t, your employees will look for easier ways to share their work – much of it sensitive – and that puts your organization at risk. When you funnel file traffic through security checkpoints, each file is efficiently inspected and secured so the risk of a data leak is mitigated.

Say Goodbye to Shadow IT and Hello to Data Privacy Compliance

Once you have secured the apps your employees use in their workflows, you can breathe a little easier because you’ve lowered your exposure to shadow IT. While organizations will never be completely free from shadow IT risk, CISOs have removed the temptation with secure enterprise applications. No more panic attacks about your employees sharing sensitive information externally with Dropbox, Google Drive or other consumer file sharing app. With enterprise application plugins, CISOs also know they’re demonstrating regulatory compliance with government regulations in place to protect customer privacy.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the importance of unifying access to your enterprise content repositories to shrink the threat surface of your third-party workflows.

To learn more about how to build a holistic defense of the third-party workflow threat surface, schedule a custom demo of Kiteworks today.

Additional Resources

• Glossary Third-Party Risk Management Framework
• Blog Post An Enterprise Content Management System
• Blog Post Data Regulatory Compliance
• Blog Post What is Email Compliance?
• Blog Post What is an Enterprise Content Management System?