In this day and age, more and more people work on-the-go from many locations. As this trend has grown, so has the number of ways you can accomplish managing business from anywhere! From Skype, to Dropbox, to a slew of cloud-hosted email providers, there are dozens of tools to keep you in communication and sharing documents and data with your team. Cloud-hosted email and softphones are wonderful solutions. And – Big Box data sharing solutions can be great for a lot of reasons, but there’s some critical “gotchas” which outweighs them all – SECURITY & DATA PROTECTION.
Services such as Dropbox leave your business open to 7 major threats:
- Data Theft – Most of the problems with Dropbox emanate from a lack of oversight. Business owners are not privy to when an instance of Dropbox is installed and are unable to control which employee devices can or cannot sync with a corporate PC. Use of Dropbox can open the door to company data being synced (without approval) across personal devices. The proliferation of these personal devices, which accompany employees on public transit, at coffee shops, and with friends, exponentially increases the chance of data being stolen or shared with the wrong parties.
- Data Loss – When administrators cannot manage and monitor file sync activities across an organization, they risk losing critical data. If an employee (or group of employees) adopts Dropbox and starts using it to sync and share sensitive files, administrators without proper oversight cannot manage data sprawl, initiate remote wipes in the case of lost devices, and are unable to guarantee that files are properly shared with the right people.
- Corrupted Data – In a study by CERN, the European Organization of Nuclear Research, silent data corruption was observed in 1 out of every 1500 files. Dropbox and other consumer-grade file sync services disclose few, if any, details about how they prevent data corruption from occurring. True business-grade file sync services cryptographically tag every piece of data and redundantly store data on multiple data center racks to virtually eliminate any chances of silent data corruption, which has been shown to be common in large-scale storage systems.
- Lawsuits – Dropbox gives carte blanche power to employees over the ability to permanently delete and share files. This can result in the permanent loss of critical business documents as well as the sharing of confidential information, which can break privacy agreements in place with clients and third parties.
- Compliance Violations – Many compliance policies require that files be held for a specific duration and only be accessed by certain people; in these cases, it is imperative to employ strict control over how long files are kept and who can access them. Since Dropbox has loose (or non-existent) file retention and file access controls, businesses that use Dropbox are risking a compliance violation.
- Loss of Accountability – Managers whose employees use Dropbox do not have access to detailed reports and alerts over system-level activity. As a resuIt, administrators do not have control of or visibility into how files have been edited, shared, or deleted. Business-grade, admin-controlled file sync services allow managers to view a comprehensive audit trail that details who touched or modified a file at any given point.
- Loss of File access – Dropbox does not track which users and machines touched a file and at which times. This can be a big problem if you are trying to determine the events leading up to a file’s creation, modification, or deletion. Moreover, at a moment’s notice, files and folders may not be in their proper locations or readily available to employees.
Using a truly Business Grade hosted file sharing solution reduces these risks significantly. AZBS’ Cloud Sharing Solution – OneDriveNow, has many enhanced features that make it superior to Dropbox and other Big Box Competitors.
- Self–managed view and edit permissions: Manage your file shares so only certain members of your team can access certain files and folders.
- Remote Data–wipe: If a person is leaving your firm for any reason, we can quickly and easily revoke their access to synced files as long as those devices are online.
- Corporate Branding: We can take your business’ branding, and personalize your cloud interface.
- External Contact Secure File Sharing: Sending confidential or otherwise sensitive material? Leverage OneDriveNow to send documents to your clients, and allow access for specific durations of time.
If you’re looking to protect your data from the risks associated with the Dropboxes of the world, call us today to explore a more Secure Private Cloud Sharing solution, and rest easy knowing your data is protected.
