Businesses Need Secure and Fast Collaboration

According to a recent study, 96% of corporate executives think that productive remote and hybrid work is dependent on clear communication. Additionally, Slack asserts that the use of collaboration tools can boost productivity by 30%. It makes sense that organizations are adopting these SaaS based technologies, given their many advantages. They facilitate collaboration, which is a key objective for virtually any enterprise in order to increase productivity while at the same time reducing costs.

Yet, they also present a fresh set of compliance and security issues. When it comes to collaborating, businesses must strike a balance between security, speed and productivity. It is not an option to do nothing. Uber’s recent Slack channel hack serves as just one instance of how crucial collaboration security is.

However, traditional security solutions like DLP were designed to restrict and, in some instances, block communication due to their limited abilities to reasonably assess the interactions between users and the data they are accessing. That’s insufficient for today’s enterprise environment. Effective collaboration is impossible without business communication and the sharing of information and data. You no longer need to choose between the two, thanks to new data security strategies for your collaboration tools. Effective security depends on being able to dynamically categorize sensitive information across collaboration technologies and knowing which actions are appropriate.

Collaboration tool vulnerabilities

Collaboration tools have one thing in common: they operate on data. While using these tools you often share data and documents, some of it sensitive and subject to security and compliance requirements.

These platforms prioritize collaboration by enabling users to share information in an effortless way. Users exchange documents without considering the sensitive nature of the information within some of the documents and there is a chance that someone could gain access to these records or data without authorization. While using collaboration tools, it is easy to share information in a way that’s not secure, such as by leaving a link open to the public or keeping data shared with a former third-party provider.

Using collaboration technology as a backdoor, hackers broke into Electronic Arts, a provider of digital interactive entertainment, last summer and stole credentials. As we saw in the instance of the Google executive accused of stealing trade secrets, insider threat is also an issue.

In fact, according to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, 82% of data breaches featured a human component. The most recent data security events underscore both the vulnerability of collaborative technologies and the role that people played in these events. The fact that most firms still are understaffed and frequently have undertrained employees only makes the matter worse.

Balancing collaboration with security

It can be tempting for some more traditional organizations to minimize this risk by limiting or even forbidding the use of these collaborative tools, but doing so hampers business. Although this approach may be a bit more secure, it causes conflict, impeding communication and slowing down the business. Slower is not an option in the current world we operate in. Suffice to say, restricting the use of collaboration tools is limiting and whether authorized or not, workers will still find ways to exchange the knowledge necessary to perform their duties. Finding a method that allows for safe data sharing is the best course of action to pursue.

Currently, enterprises use 80 IT-approved SaaS apps on average, and that figure is rising. That excludes any SaaS applications that staff members may be using without IT’s approval – also known as Shadow IT. It is not possible to secure all of them; instead, you should start with securing the most commonly used collaboration channels, like OneDrive, Slack, GitHub, or GDrive, the tools that are predominantly used to share and move data.

It’s all about the context

Because this new way of working is much more distributed, the same security tools that were used for the old way of working won’t do. Also, manually categorizing the data and using static policies is cumbersome, resulting in a high rate of false positives and noise.

Contextual visibility is what organizations need. Let’s imagine a file is shared externally; what if there was a method for automatically and dynamically recognizing what actions are justified and which are not? With this knowledge relating to the interactions between users and the data they are using, you can take swift action and prevent the risk of the file’s information from being made public.

An outdated system might immediately warn you that a staff member has sent sensitive material and block it immediately. But with more modern data security technologies, you can ascertain more context. With that context, you are aware that the employee is a patent attorney who sent a patent to a contractor who is working on other patents in the same patents Slack channel. This enables you to justify the employee’s action and assess the risk is low.

In legacy data security solutions, static rules produce a great many false positives. The “why” behind each activity must be understood contextually in order to address the issue of assessing security across collaboration tools. You can’t adequately resolve legitimate issues without having context.

You therefore need a dynamically updated set of rules – because there’s no way to accomplish this manually – having dynamic approach and analytics will lead to extremely low noise and accurate detection of unsafe data access and leakage. The sensitive information in your collaboration tools can now be automatically mapped using AI-based solutions, and every action in every channel will have business context.

Before alerting on an action, the system can assign a reason for it by knowing the relationship across platforms between data and individuals. As a result, noise is greatly reduced, the number of false alarms is significantly decreased, and security professionals are better able to identify unsafe actions quickly. Technologies like this give IT and security professionals insight and control over the data being exchanged across collaboration channels before any harm can be done.

Safer collaboration

The pandemic compelled nearly every business to provide remote work choices, which resulted in a major surge in the usage of collaboration software tools. However, this was frequently done without giving security and governance teams the ability to assess and manage both data and risk to their organizations. Businesses are now attempting to figure out how to combine the best of both worlds: real-time collaboration with complete control, visibility and security. With new approaches and technological innovations to help organizations map and classify the data within their SaaS collaboration tools, they can deploy collaborative tools with confidence. Businesses are now able to both enhance their security posture with the aid of contextual visibility and dynamic rules while at the same time maximizing their full business potential!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ofer Klein, co-Founder and CEO at Reco, is a former Israeli pilot and a serial entrepreneur with a vast experience in building and growing go-to-market teams in SaaS companies in the U.S. He is enthusiastic about leading solutions for the distributed workforce.