This is an excerpt of an article published in Cyber Defense Magazine (CDM) on July 1, 2019
By Dr. Steve Marsh, Vice President of Product for Nucleus Cyber
Enterprise collaboration is changing rapidly. Driven by the Cloud and how we share information in our personal lives, social collaboration tools have made their way into the workplace. Where email was once king, we now have 1:1 and group chats, single click file sharing and the ability to seamlessly move between a chat, VoIP call and video group chat.
Just how pervasive are modern collaboration tools? Seventy-two percent of companies surveyed by McKinsey Global Institute are using social technologies to facilitate employee communication, knowledge sharing, and productivity. Microsoft, for example, touts Teams (its social collaboration tool), as the fastest growing business app in the company’s history.
These technologies have quickly become the cornerstone of modern collaboration making it easy for employees to interact with information, and each other, from anywhere in the world. However, they also reinforce old challenges, while presenting new ones that organizations must quickly address to avoid security compromise. For example:
- There’s a continued lack of visibility into where sensitive information lives within the enterprise and what is being done with it. A staggering 60% of organizations admit half of their data is dark, meaning they don’t know how to find or use it; or don’t know it exists, at all.
- Much like personal social tools, employees tend to be very open with what they share with a broader audience. According to a study, employee collaboration messages are 144% more likely to contain confidential information, 165% more likely to contain identification numbers and 6% more likely to contain passwords.
- The exposure of information to unauthorized audiences, and even the public, due to the misconfiguration of sharing settings is a pervasive issue. Marquee companies, including Apple, Box and Discovery Network exposed their sensitive corporate and customer data due to the incorrect use of public sharing links.
These changing collaboration paradigms, as well as existing and emerging challenges, underscore the need to adapt data-centric security strategies to protect assets from threats.
Continue reading the article in CDM: http://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/enterprise-social-collaboration-security-friend-or-foe/
