Cloud File Sync & Sharing: Risks and Solutions (Part 1)
This blog post is the first in a series on the data risks and solutions available for file sync and sharing services.
Your employees are using file sharing services. Ignoring reality or denying its existence will not change the fact that today’s tech users want to easily share files, and that they will circumvent IT if needed.
Failing to provide a secure, reliable service, puts your data — and your business — at risk.
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Case Study 1: Inside Sales Disappear
An inside sales representative at a B2B industrial supply company was signing on new customers. While the contract were all boilerplate, the rep use a personal Dropbox account to share them with customers for signature and to store them once signed. After failing to be promoted, the rep quit the firm. The company had no copies and no access to dozens of customer agreements.
Case Study 2: Order Management Gone Wrong
A customer service rep was using a personal file sharing service to send/receive credit card authorization forms with customers and, unintentionally, his family. The company became aware of the problem (and PCI violation) when a customer called to inquire about an attempted electronics purchase the day after they had provided the form. The rep’s teenage son had attempted to make an online purchase with “credit card number in Dad’s account.”
Case Study 3: No Backup = No Restore
A CEO recently contacted his IT department, asking that they restore several critical files needed for a business meeting the next day, as he could no longer find them. After searching several iterations of backups and audit logs, they informed the CEO that the IT team could not find any indication that the files had ever existed. The CEO had created the documents locally on his PC, then placed them in a personal file sharing service so that he could access them while traveling. Without any protection, restoring the deleted files was impossible.
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While these examples may seem extreme, if your employees are using personal, unsecured file sharing services, they may already be happening to you.
Back in September, we posted about the increasing problem of rogue cloud services. Over the course of this series, we will look specifically at cloud-based file sharing services, their risks, and solutions that protect your data, your reputation, and your business.
