Commenting on new research that has found that one in five employees uses Dropbox for work files, a data governance product firm says the findings highlight the need for more robust controls that take the security risks out of collaboration. The study – of more than 1,000 corporate IT users – also suggests that when IT has a policy against using file sharing at work, half of employees use these services nonetheless; and corporate leaders are the worst culprits. VPs and directors are most likely to use Dropbox despite the risks.
The findings, from enterprise storage product firm Nasuni, corroborate and support Varonis’ own industry research on cloud sync services. The study, conducted with IT people earlier this year, found that:
80 per cent of companies do not allow their employees to use the cloud services they want due to security fears; however, 36pc of respondents reported that they are regularly using cloud-based file synchronisation services
70pc of companies would use these services if they were as robust as internal tools
20pc of companies have no measures in place at all to prevent their staff from accessing file synchronisation tools, leaving their employees free to take sensitive data outside the company with them
Only 9pc of those have created authorisation and review processes for the data residing in the cloud
Only 30pc report that senior management knows where organisational data reside
78pc of those surveyed would prefer to use their existing permissions and storage rather than the cloud
With Bring Your Own Services (BYOS) threatening to sweep past all company defenses and carry away the company data, the reaction seems two-fold: while the majority of companies block file sync services completely, the rest leave their employees free reign.
“We weren’t surprised to see the results of Nasuni’s research. We know from our experience as well that as workers are increasingly required to divide their time between working on the move, at home and in the office, companies and employees alike yearn for the convenience of file sync services. There continues to be an increasing amount of industry research that’s proving employees are circumventing IT controls, breaching the defences of a corporation and introducing a host of new vulnerabilities.
“The challenge for us all as solution providers is to deliver services that maintain the robust security controls while empowering staff to do their work wherever, whenever and from whichever device they need,” said David Gibson, Vice President of Strategy for Varonis.
Gibson offered tips for secure collaboration:
Create an inventory of your most used collaboration platforms to get an overview where data lives, who has access to it, and who is using it.
Identify data owners for each data set and have owners perform a preliminary entitlement review to see if data is stored in the right place and if the right people have access to it.
Remediate any exposures, such as data that is accessible to too many people or regulated/sensitive content that is stored in the wrong place.
Monitor access to all data – this will help easily identity data owners and identify unused data and abuse.
Put a process into place that provides secure collaboration for remote employees – including synchronisation, mobile device support and extranet functionality – that works within the existing enterprise servers and infrastructure.
To download Varonis’ Cloud Synchronisation Services Research report, visit http://hub.varonis.com/BYOSSurvey
For more on the Nasuni research, visit http://www6.nasuni.com/shadow-it-2012.html
