Dangerous Collaboration Practices in a Challenging Economy: 5 Roles IT Must Perform to Minimize Risk

WHITE PAPER Dangerous Collaboration Practices in a Challenging Economy: 5 Roles IT Must Perform to Minimize Risk Executive Summary » The changing economy presents daunting challenges in information security. Companies are pressed to collaborate with more and more outside partners, and many business processes—due diligence, compliance, product development, sales and marketing—involve sharing of confidential information. The demands for productivity and speed drive executives and project team members to share information outside the firewall, even in the absence of a safe collaboration platform—putting companies at risk of security breaches or data leakage. Several vendors offer online work spaces to meet the demand for safe, efficient document sharing. IT should define security policies and requirements for these collaborative spaces, ensure that they support existing security policies, and manage their implementation and integration with existing systems and applications. As fleeting opportunities arise suddenly, IT leaders can create competitive advantage for their companies by managing the process of setting up and taking down highly secure online work space for document sharing. White Paper Dangerous Collaboration Practices in a Challenging Economy: 5 Roles IT Must Perform to Minimize Risk Introduction: Sharing Documents is More Risky and More Necessary than Ever Organizations are working collaboratively more than ever before. Not only must they circulate documents during the M&A process for due diligence and compliance purposes, but also in everyday interactions with suppliers, consultants, accountants, ad agencies, auditors, offsite contract workers, partners of all sorts and more. Many of these documents are confidential or sensitive in various ways and need to be protected. And there is no way to avoid ever-increasing collaboration. The turbulent economy, heightened cost pressure, customer price sensitivity, increased government involvement and growing compliance demands are driving collaboration as companies restructure, link up and seek upstream and downstream partners to improve efficiency and competitiveness as they focus on boosting their part in the value chain. The very act of sharing documents with external parties is inherently risky, yet the processes that allow a company to succeed in a difficult economy cannot be conducted without exchanging information. In order to effectively collaborate with external partners, companies must allow sensitive documents to travel outside the firewall where they are no longer under the organization’s direct control. Many are financial documents of course, but others contain various business records, customer lists, product and manufacturing requirements, design specifications, strategic plans, sales and marketing strategies and more—all involving information the organization wants to keep confidential. Given the tremendous competitive pressures that compel businesses to share documents, how will you ensure that external partners and their employees and associates exercise proper care of sensitive documents? The most trusted partners can make mistakes, and yet companies cannot remain competitive without collaboration. That is why IT must provide a means for companies to establish and enforce effective control over their documents when they share them with others beyond the organization, especially when the documents land on the desks of people that may not have a long-established relationship with the organization. This paper is intended for corporate executives and IT and business managers concerned with document security, especially when working with outside parties. The paper below: • Summarizes current collaboration options • Introduces the secure online collaboration option page 1 ( Dangerous Collaboration Practices in a Challenging Economy: 5 Roles IT Must Perform to Minimize Risk • Identifies critical requirements for secure document sharing • Highlights five IT roles in defining security policies, addressing collaboration outside the firewall, and providing a platform that enables business users to comply with these policies Today’s Document Sharing Options Ideally, organizations would prefer to prevent sensitive documents from leaving the company’s network at all, remaining instead case study: behind the firewall where they stay under direct control. This Construction Project Management option, however, is impossible since companies’ crucial business challenge: processes must, by definition, include collaboration with a A major supplier of wind power changing network of partners, suppliers, consultants, customers, solutions engaged in multiple projects regulatory agencies and often potential M&A bidders. that install new turbines on a daily basis needed a way to efficiently transfer technology to partners, Interestingly, the more sensitive a document is, the more likely developers, suppliers and contractors. it will be shared with partners outside the company. Driven by Working with worldwide partners and in remote locations, they needed economic and competitive pressures, business managers find to provide access to project plans and themselves compelled to collaborate with partners outside the specifications on a 24/7 basis. corporate perimeter, sharing even the most sensitive documents solution: despite the increased risk. The company set up a data room to serve as an online work space that Since documents invariably must be shared at various points, outside partners could access around the clock, from any computer with a organizations use a number of options: browser and an Internet connection. Project managers use the data room’s • Overnight express of documents—whether on paper, magnetic workflow tools to set tasks and get an overview of progress on each input media, CD, or thumb drives, such physical delivery works but required from the many participants. is expensive and slow, and the organization loses control over Each document’s history is captured in an audit trail to track changes made the media once they’ve left the premises by each user and to provide back- ground information for use in planning • Email attachments—the default choice of business users in the future projects. By using the data room, the company is able to manage absence of a secure collaboration platform, but definitely complex projects and accelerate the not secure construction process.