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Avoid Data Breaches With a Secure Inner Perimeter Around Your Digital Assets

Avoid data breaches with a secure inner perimeter around your most valuable digital assets

Your secure content communication channel must control every file saved and retrieved from every enterprise content repository to provide complete protection against a breach. Global data security, governance, and visibility require uniform access control, policy enforcement and monitoring of all content repositories across the extended enterprise. Unfortunately, large global organizations have a lot of sensitive content distributed across many disparate locations, including enterprise applications, ECM systems, network file shares and cloud storage services to name a few. Complex, varied storage locations increase the risk that sensitive information will leak undetected.

CISOs must enable secure content communication that balances the protection of sensitive content with the overwhelming need to share it, easing access while preventing breaches, ensuring privacy alongside transparency, and adhering to complex regulations without getting in the way of efficient communication. Each trade-off entails risks. This blog series explores these trade-offs and offers six guiding principles for creating a secure content sharing channel that enables work across the extended enterprise and protects your most sensitive digital assets.

disparate storage locations are at higher risk of a data breach

In my last blog post, I discussed the need for organizations to eliminate shadow IT with a secure communication channel that shares sensitive content efficiently. Today, I’ll discuss how CISOs can protect their organizations from a breach once they control every file saved and retrieved from every enterprise content repository.

If You Can’t Consolidate Repositories, Consolidate Content Access Instead

The bad news is that the simplest solution to this problem—consolidating all enterprise content into a single repository—is not feasible for most organizations. Existing, distributed content stores are often too integrated into existing workflows and too expensive to migrate. Enterprise applications often require content in specific data formats. Regulatory requirements, such as national or regional data sovereignty rules, may prohibit the consolidation of content across international boundaries. And, highly sensitive content should be segregated to implement tighter security, such as multi-factor authentication. The good news is that you don’t need to consolidate content physically. You just need to consolidate it virtually through metadata and controls to unify content access, security, governance, and visibility.

Avoid data breaches with a secure internal perimeter

Confidentiality means ensuring only authorized users can access, modify, and share specific content in specific ways. It must be enforced at the user-application-content level, because that is where this information resides. [source: Accellion secure content communication platform]

Ensure All Content is Shared Securely With Content Repository Connectors

By deploying connectors to content repositories that intercept, monitor, and manage storage and retrieval requests, you can create a secure inner perimeter around your most valuable digital assets that complements the secure external perimeter created by plugins to end user sharing applications. As files pass through this perimeter, granular permissions and detailed content scans can ensure that only authorized files are retrieved and sent externally, and only safe files are received and stored internally. Nothing falls through the cracks.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how CISOs can prevent compliance failures with complete auditability. To demonstrate compliance with industry regulations and standards, organizations must have complete auditability of all content, content sharing, and all content-related systems, policies, and procedures.

Don’t want to wait? Download the eBook now!
The Risky Business of Online Collaboration

The Risky Business of Online Collaboration

Discover the 6 principles for securing sensitive content without getting in the way of efficient communications with this informative eBook.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Cyber Security on Security Boulevard – Accellion authored by Cliff White. Read the original post at: https://www.accellion.com/blog/avoid-data-breaches-with-a-secure-inner-perimeter-around-your-digital-assets/

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Cliff White

Cliff White is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Accellion. Mr. White joined Accellion in 2011. He has more than 15 years of experience in the software industry and web-based technologies. He has also managed global engineering teams and advised C-level executives on software product engineering and best practices. Before joining Accellion, Mr. White developed highly scalable software for imageshack.com, an online media hosting company and one of the most visited websites on the internet. Previously, he led the engineering function for rentadvisor.com, a peer review and recommendation website for rental properties before it was acquired by apartmentlist.com.

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