chat, voice, video and files together in one tool, sensitive data is no longer contained in files alone: it
exists, literally, everywhere.
A false sense of security
When used properly, social collaboration tools improve teamwork, empower better decision making and
increase productivity. An open dialogue of new ideas, best practices and lessons learned are more
valuable when sharing them across a wide audience, rather than staying locked within siloed email
threads.
That same wave of positive community engagement does have a downside: the threat of being too open
and unfiltered. Users can be lulled into a false sense of security when sharing information within a
company chat or using a sharing link. They wrongly assume their company has anticipated all possible
security issues when sanctioning a tool that employees are asked to use.
Or, consider basic user errors, like the addition of the wrong person with a similar name as the intended
recipient, losing track of who’s in the chat group or replying to the wrong chat thread (we’ve all been
there). Not to mention the risks of someone intentionally trying to expand a chat that is intended to be
restricted to just a handful of colleagues.
While the ability to quickly share a file and comment or directly collaborate on it with colleagues is infinitely
better than the version control nightmare of passing email attachments back and forth, the danger is the
nature of sharing link. In the aforementioned headline-making breaches, users at over 90 companies
shared files, and in some cases an entire cloud storage folder, with a link that was open to the entire
public internet.
Whether intentional or not, collaboration freedoms come with inherent risks that require methodical
management beyond just user training.
Data is also the key to securing collaboration
Organizations must accept some fundamental data truths in order to truly protect it in the modern
workplace: