Posts from ‘Visibility’
Every organization that values security is facing challenges in how it secures information shared between people, either inside the company or with people outside the company such as customers or partners.
Jeff Whitney, VP of Marketing, sat down with Enterprise Management 360 Editor David Tran to discuss trends and issues around person-to-person file sharing within business.
EM360°: What are you seeing as the key trends today impacting person-to-person file sharing within businesses?
Jeff Whitney: There are essentially three key trends in person-to-person file sharing.
First of all, taking a few steps back, it has only been a few decades ago, in a work world that’s now long forgotten, that IBM mainframes ruled the world. In the good old days, the vast majority of confidential company and customer information was locked down in those mainframe computers. People were only able to access it by wading through computer printouts, or if they were lucky, by accessing large cathode ray VCT terminals. People couldn’t get hold of that information and risk sharing it elsewhere.
But today, the work world is entirely different. Today businesses are dominated with knowledge workers who have personal computers, and each one is far more powerful than those old mainframes. These PCs are filled with confidential company and customer files.
The second trend is that, with all the information that knowledge workers have, they are sending an ever-increasing volume of information to their extended enterprise; to their suppliers, shipping vendors; and their customers and every imaginable type of data being shared including legal documents, patient records, loyalty data, package locations, insurance claims, account information, purchase orders, x-rays, test results, and investment information, just to name a few.
The third trend is, with all of this going on, IT hasn’t been able to keep up with this flow of information, and there is a plethora of easy ways that employees can use to transfer files. For instance: company email, personal email and consumer collaboration systems like Dropbox. Employees are using these non-secure systems because IT hasn’t been able to provide them with solutions that are convenient enough. They are not knowledgeable of these security risks, and all they want to do is get their work done.
EM360°: From a corporate perspective, what security risks and challenges are therefore in place that management, IT and security professionals need to be aware of?
These file-sharing techniques that employees are using can create security breaches. Even company email is often not secure as it is coming across in an unencrypted way.
You could be breaking corporate compliance obligations — if you are in financial services, in healthcare, or any number of other places who have policies or compliance regulations.
There is a true lack of visibility of Audit trails. You lock down your cash, so you know what is happening to your cash. And yet knowledge is regarded as far more important to businesses, or at least as important as cash. Yet, we are letting that knowledge flow back and forth in very non-secure manners. And the reality is who will get in trouble if that happens — is it the employee who sends it? Definitely. But equally, the senior manager is going to walk into the IT department, asking why IT hasn’t provided their workforce with solutions that can protect secure the data and provide the governance and compliance the business needs.
EM360°: So now let’s get to the survey. We see your eBook states that 84% of respondents acknowledge they send classified or confidential information as email attachments. That’s astounding. What do you see driving that behavior?
It is really driven by the fact that employees are just trying to get their job done. They are surrounded by solutions — personal email, consumer collaboration tools — that allow them to share information in a very easy to use and rapid form. They carry that over into their work lives. If they know that they could send a file very quickly using a readily available consumer tool, they are not going to wait around for a member of the IT department to help them.
I think it’s actually very appropriate to discuss the magnitude of file-sharing. You mentioned that 84% are using or sending confidential information using these kinds of tools. In that 84%, they are actually sending classified emails with email attachments, which I have reiterated before, is not secure.
Almost three quarters of those — 72% — are doing it weekly, and more than half are doing it every day. This is a major issue.
In fact it gets even worse as employees aren’t using only their work emails, but instead are using their personal email. Some 50% are using their personal emails to send over work attachments. 40% say it’s because it is faster and more convenient. 35% say it is because of file size issues. And 30% say their IT department can’t monitor or audit. They are sending over confidential company information, and for some reason, they do not want IT to monitor that. It’s wrong.
Additionally, 50% are using file sharing websites, and of those, a quarter are doing that weekly, and some of those websites are well known for data breaches and have been publicized for it over the past few months.
EM360°: Jeff, there’s a set of risks in place with most organizations today. So what can companies do to balance the needs of the employee vs. the organization?
What companies need to do is to provide secure managed file transfer capabilities for their employees that they will readily adopt. These tools need to be convenient, straight-forward, and allow fast transfer of knowledge. And for the business, it needs to provide the security and governance (control, security, compliance) that companies demand. You need to have both; it isn’t just one or the other.
IT isn’t just sitting on resources that are readily available to attack any issue. This issue has just blown up so quickly that IT has been slow to respond. Our survey shows that only 25% of IT organizations actually enforce the usage of IT-sanctioned tools. Only about 40% of organizations have visibility into the movement of their confidential data in and out of their business. And only about 15% receive confirmation of when critical data is being delivered.
As I said, IT organizations haven’t been able to catch up with this trend, and they haven’t provided the solutions that are out there to address this.
So how is Ipswitch File Transfer addressing this increasing need that you’re seeing for secure person-to-person file transfer within organizations?
Ipswitch File Transfer has a long history of providing managed file transfer capabilities for organizations, specifically for IT to manage these issues.
Our MOVEit™ Ad Hoc Transfer solution enables employees to send and receive files and messages between individuals and groups using an Outlook or a simple browser interface. MOVEit™ meets employees’ needs for convenience, ease-of-use and speed and IT’s need for governance, including control, visibility, security and compliance.
EM360°: Jeff, thank you for sharing your insights with us. The eBook Jeff mentioned is available and includes the full details of the research we have cited around the risks of person-to-person file transfer within business.
In our recent webinar “File sharing: Have employee habits put your company at risk?”, Michael Osterman of Osterman Research and David Boone of Ipswitch File Transfer spoke about the issues associated with trends in individual file sharing and the impact they have on businesses.
There is continued increased usage of rogue tools to share files and information when employees don’t have an adequate solution provided to them by their business. These tools include everything from personal email accounts (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!) to cloud-based personal file sharing tools (YouSendIt, DropBox) all the way through to USB drives or what David refers to as “SneakerNet” — walking private data around the office on USB drives which can be easily misplaced or lost.
Michael and David also take a look at what information technology teams can do to deliver solutions to businesses that will address these risks, and tips on how to balance the need for end-user simplicity with the control, security and visibility required by the organization.
- Watch the on-demand webinar recording
Lastly they cover five key criteria to consider when selecting a business-class file sharing solution for your organization:
- Make sure it can handle unlimited file sizes.
- Confirm that minimal training is required to deploy it.
- Ensure it is secure. This includes utilizing encryption both in motion and at rest, and that the message itself is encrypted too.
- For successful user adoption, make sure it’s easy to use.
- Finally, make sure it’s easy to integrate into your existing environment.
For the full discussion between Michael and David as well as the question-and-answer session with the audience, we invite you to view the webinar recording. We also invite you to share this with any colleagues who you think may find it useful.
What are the benefits, the risks, the consequences, and the alternatives to the proliferation of personal file transfer and file sharing tools?
Consumer-grade solutions such as Dropbox, webmail and USB drives being rapidly adopted in the workplace. The question is — are they right for you and your organization?
Next Wednesday, on April 25th, you’re invited to join industry experts Michael Osterman and Ipswitch’s David Boone in a 29-minute rapid-fire discussion where we will address:
- Typical Tools – What are the products employees are bringing with them to work?
- What are the risks of relying on personal file sharing tools in the workplace?
- How can I balance the need of the individual with the requirements of the organization?
- Top 3 things to look for in an easy-to-use and governed business-class file sharing solution?
If you manage an IT environment where these tools are pervasively used by employees to send company information, then you’re encouraged to participate in what should be a very opinionated discussion. Bring your questions. Challenge the experts. Learn how to regain control. And enjoy the conversation. Register now.
P.S. – if you are unable to attend the live event, please register anyways and we’ll email you a link to the archived recording for playback on-demand, as your schedule permits.
Ericka Chickowski did a nice job in her Dark Reading article on how old-fashioned FTP introduces unnecessarily levels of compliance and security risks to organizations. And here’s an alarming data point from Harris Interactive – approximately 50% of organizations are currently using the FTP protocol to send and exchange files and data.
Talk of security concerns with FTP is certainly not new. FTP was never designed to provide any type of encryption, making it possible for data to be compromised while in-transit. A common answer for this is to use encrypted standards-based protocols such as SSL/FTPS and SSH/SFTP.
Luckily, modern managed file transfer solutions deliver not only the security you know your business requires, but also the visibility and control that IT needs to properly govern company information.
Ipswitch’s Greg Faubert offers his thoughts in the Dark Reading article:
“While FTP is a ubiquitous protocol, depending on it as a standard architecture for file exchange is a bad strategy…. The PCI standards look specifically at the security surrounding your FTP environment. It is a significant area of focus for auditors, and they will fail companies in their PCI audits for a lack of adequate controls.”
And yet, somehow, many organizations continue to rely on unencrypted FTP to transport mission-critical or sensitive information. For those guilty, here are a few steps to help you get started in migrating away from antiquated FTP. And don’t worry, it won’t be painful.
There is so much to absorb at RSA Conference. The largest gathering of security vendors, solution providers and practitioners in the U.S. certainly didn’t disappoint as the Moscone Center was buzzing with security education and of course lots of thought provoking conversations.
Many of the people I spoke with shared similar concerns of data breach risk, tighter compliance and auditing requirements, and their lack of visibility and control over the tools that people are using inside their organization to share files and data with other people. IT leaders are feeling 
pressure (and rightfully so) to regain control over how people share files with other people. It was also great hear so many people talking about migrating to the public and private clouds in order to take advantage of benefits such as quick provisioning and elasticity.
My favorite conversations at conferences are usually the ones I have with current customers…. And RSA was no exception. Quite frankly, the key insights I learn from talking with customers help me do my job better. Many thanks to the dozen or so Ipswitch customers that stopped by our booth and shared stories of how they have successfully consolidated and replaced the various homegrown file transfer tools and scripts, various vendor products, and manual processes they had been relying on with an Ipswitch MFT solution, resulting in improved efficiencies in their business processes as well as a simplified way to demonstrate compliance and consistently enforce security policies for all their file transfer and file sharing activities.
