Risks of Consumer Oriented File Sharing Platforms

Regardless of the industry your business falls under, the ability of your employees to securely access tools and information to perform their duties is critical.  Providing employees easy access to files and folders is essential to keep business operations flowing and to avoid serious file sharing risks.

Since the days of the floppy disk, users have come up with some pretty creative ways to quickly and easily save information, as well as share it with each other. Technology has advanced to the point where email is no longer considered a convenient or secure way to share data.  Consumer level file sharing and sync options being utilized by individuals without IT knowledge lack security and increase risks to your business.

According to a study done by Gigaom Research and Harris Interactive, a staggering 84% of IT professionals reported security problems caused by the use of consumer-oriented file sharing services for company business. Even for personal use, only about one-third of those users polled stated they trusted file sharing services.

There are many reasons why consumer-oriented file-sharing platforms aren’t trusted – chief among them being lack of control over how company data is shared, service reliability, and the fact these platforms steer users to set up automatic file syncing of work files to the cloud whether required or not.

Developing Policies for Enterprise Level File Sharing

However, all is not lost, as organizations can utilize Enterprise File Sharing and Sync platforms. Although there are still risks involved with even enterprise file share and remote access solutions. Here are five tips that you should take into account when developing policies for enterprise level file sharing.

Set Permissions

By documenting which network activities are allowed and which are not, you are making it clear to employees what is an acceptable use of your network.

Passwords Matter

You’d be amazed at how often employees use very basic passwords for their workstations on-site or remote. Some don’t even bother to change the default password that was initially set up. Having password rules with a minimum length of 9 characters and complexity restrictions in place can mitigate the security risk of generic passwords and can also control how data flows into your network and who has access.

Define Mobile Policy

BYOD isn’t going away, so if you haven’t taken the time to implement controls and policies as part of your IT strategy you need to. With the number of employees utilizing their mobile devices to access proprietary business data, keeping it secure and off personal devices that cannot be managed is a high priority.

Meet Employee Needs

If you don’t have the right tools in place for employees to do what they are supposed to do, you likely don’t have visibility or control over how they are sharing and accessing sensitive data. By meeting the needs of your workforce, you are also keeping your company secure.  MyWorkDrive provides employees this easy remote access to work files and folders.

Teach Security Best Practices

If you have a remote workforce of any kind you will want to ensure they are aware of security best practices for sharing and accessing company data, connecting to secure Wi-Fi and not using public Wi-Fi, and always locking their personal devices. Education is key.