This blog will help you gain insights on advantages and risks associated with external file sharing solutions for modern industries. As you scroll down, you will learn about benefits of effective collaboration, and important recommendations for risk mitigation.
Advantages of External Files Sharing:
External file sharing technologies and solutions provide a wide range of benefits for enterprises, such as:
Improves collaboration among teams:
External file sharing tools allow ease of collaborating smoothly with various clients, team members, and partners. This in turn boosts real time feedback, speeds up the task of different projects, and promotes agile methodology.
Boost productivity:
External file sharing tools are designed to provide secured access, thereby reducing the need to depend on email attachment, version controlling, and sharing files manually. This further helps in streamlining workflow in cross-functional teams, brings down the administration stress, and helps staff to concentrate on strategic tasks that require informed decision making.
Enhances customer experience:
By leveraging external data sharing tools, companies can easily transfer files to clients, and partners effectively. This helps to enhance the customer experience and increase customer retention.
It is economical for enterprise:
External file sharing tools provide higher scalability as they come with pay-as-you-go alternatives. This eventually decreases the expenditure incurred on on-prem storage, and software updating.
Risks Related to External File Sharing:
Though external file transferring solution provides valuable advantages, they also include certain risks, such as:
Risk of data breach:
As the enterprise shares files to external parties, it increases the likelihood of files getting accessed by unauthorized persons. It further leads to dangerous data breach, theft to intellectual property, or compliance risks.
Ransomware attack and malware attack:
When the files are shared externally, it has the risk of ransomware attack and malware attack. It increases the vulnerability of business systems, interrupting business tasks, which in turn leads to huge financial loss.
Regulatory and compliance related risks:
External file sharing tools lead to increasing compliance risks to organizations, especially in industry verticals like government companies, healthcare sector, and finance.
Harms to brand value and reputation:
Any data breach or security attack by external file sharing can cause harm to companies brand value and reputation. It further leads to declining customer trust and decreasing reputability of the company.
Risk Mitigation Measures and Increasing the Advantages:
For increasing the advantages and reducing the risks of external file sharing, companies must execute below mentioned methodologies:
- It is important to choose the file sharing tool that offers different security features like encrypting files with key, multi-factor authentication, and reviewing file sharing activities.
- Companies must have a well-drafted file sharing policy that includes the details of the external file sharing process, file classification and categorization process, data retention guidelines, etc.
- Organizations must provide training sessions to help employees understand the risks of file sharing and best practices to follow for preventing the risks .
- Companies must also use access control features to effectively provide user authentication, and restrict the access of data to authorized personnel only.
Best Practices to Consider for Secured File Transferring and Sharing:
For secured external file sharing, organizations must abide by below mentioned best practices:
End-to-end encryption:
It is important to encrypt the important, sensitive information with a key to easily secure the information at rest and in transit. This practice helps to prevent unauthorized data access.
Providing access control:
It is also vital to use access control features such as user authentication, RBAC (role based access control) that allows ease of restricting access to authorized users as per their defined role in the company. In this way, only the authorized personnel can access the documents.
Use SFTP and HTTPS:
It is important to leverage secured file transferring protocols, namely HTTPS and SFTPs for effectively security information in transit.
Executing DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools:
It is also vital to use DLP solutions for easily identifying and preventing any sensitive document from being shared to external parties such as clients, partners, etc.
Timely patching and upgradation of software:
Companies must schedule the timely patching and upgradation of software to detect any vulnerabilities in the system and take proper measures before they escalate.
Final Thoughts:
External file sharing is a vital part of different companies. It is important to boost collaboration opportunities, increase employees’ productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Moreover, it is important to follow the aforementioned best practices for decreasing the risks associated with external file transferring. By learning about the advantages and risks associated with file sharing, companies can mitigate the risks and maximize the benefits of file sharing solutions.