Protecting intellectual property and sensitive information is a top security concern for any organization today. Co-workers need to share documents and files with colleagues, customers and partners on a daily basis, and frequently those items contain confidential information.
The issue for IT is that “we want to give easy collaborative access, but we also need to protect the confidential information”. IT staff must ask hard questions regarding security, even though they may not be security experts. “How do we provide collaborative access to files/folders, but at the same time ensure that only those people who need to access the stored files/folders have access rights?” “What happens when an individual or a group of people needs immediate access to a secured file/folder: who manages the access rights, can access rights be arranged in advance, can access rights be managed centrally as well as at the endpoint?”
Sensitive information is stored in many different environments and comes in many different flavors. So another question to ask is: “How do we protect a file/folder when it’s on a network-shared drive, copied to a user’s desktop or put on a USB flash drive, or emailed to several people?”