By making use of available cloud services, enterprises no longer need to select between enhanced usability or greater security. When cloud services are in use, it is important for firms to balance the requirement of making access to information open to allow collaboration against the need to protect private information by locking it down.
Many organisations mistakenly make access controls too rigid, preventing efficient collaboration. Understandably, such an approach can frustrate and impede users with roles to perform. In this blog, we’ll look at how collaborating using cloud services can provide advanced security benefits compared to more traditional methods.
Understanding collaboration practices
Traditionally, collaborating with an external organisation requires sharing copies of necessary information. For instance, by using emails with attachments. This type of collaboration method creates several copies of the data involved in multiple locations, making managing access to this information problematic.
Instead of sharing copies, contemporary collaboration using a cloud-based service shares access to information that is stored in just one location. This allows users to collaborate in various ways. These includes participating in conversations via an instant message service, reviewing data files kept in a cloud storage service and checking for availability via a cloud calendar service.
What are the security benefits of modern collaboration?
When companies employ modern collaboration, data primarily remains in the cloud service. As a result, security controls within the cloud service can help keep control over which users have access to information and what they are able to do with it. It also allows firms to use greater visibility and auditing to see how their information is being used.
By sharing access to data instead of sharing the data itself, admins can change or revoke permissions when required. For instance, when a project finishes, access to data can be denied. This feature also helps when firms must respond to a security incident, such as when a user is incorrectly included as a recipient, or a third-party collaborator reports a data breach of their own system, for example. When traditional collaboration methods are used, it is far harder to recall and delete data once it has been shared.
When data remains within the cloud service, its dedicated activity logs can also be used to get a detailed view of how it is currently being handled. This useful feature also offers an overview on actions performed by users in partner organisations collaborating on a project. Should an incident occur that impact the shared information, these activity logs can be utilised to investigate any unauthorised access that was made. However, in traditional collaboration methods, activity logs are rarely collected from every recipient participating in a project.
Collaborate securely with Galaxkey
With an understanding the data must remain accessible to those who require it while staying secure, at Galaxkey we have devised a suite of tools for collaborating safely. Our secure file transfer solution can help you protect your firm from snoopers and safeguard your confidential material. Through it, you can store and share files securely and track them everywhere.
We understand that it’s easy to feel confident regarding file security when data is shared only with internal teams but collaborating requires an agile and secure solution. As a result, Galaxkey protection is easy to set up and works anywhere. Users can simply right-click a file and enable encryption.
All files and folders can be secured and uploaded to cloud storage solutions including Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and OneDrive. You can also use it to email files using the traditional method of collaboration but with enhanced security in place. Contact our specialist team now to get started.
