Enterprise Social Collaboration: Security Friend or Foe?
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