It Might Have Been You
Every firm, company, organisation or body owns intellectual property and proprietary information. This is the stuff hackers and cyber criminals crave as much as your bank account details and PIN numbers, yet we seem amazingly cavalier about governing what may happen to it outside of our defended network. How many times have you sent unprotected email to colleagues, clients or business partners that contained information about your IP or little nuggets of your proprietary information? Think about it… More often than you care to admit, I’d guess. We are so blasé about our use of email that we seldom pause to consider the security threat posed by email.
Worse yet, have you ever had cause to use an FTP file transfer site? Maybe a contract you had just drafted was too large for your firm’s email system yet you needed the client to have eyes on it urgently. These types of service generally pose a greater threat than unprotected email even if they have some built in protection. This can be difficult to set-up and grant access to the defined recipient. Moreover where are these service companies servers located geographically and whose legal jurisdiction do they fall under? Why is this of interest? Different countries have very different laws pertaining to the access to stored information, which poses just another potential threat to the leaking of your valuable IP or proprietary information.
So I guess you are starting to see the depth of the problem, it just might have been you that gave away your firm’s IP.
Taking Back Control
Taking steps to secure your email is easy, you need to encrypt it! But finding the right product is often more demanding. There are no shortage of products out there on the internet that purport to offer robust email encryption but how robust is robust and do they also include any answer to our large file transfer problem? Probably not. So how are you going to select the product that is both easy to use, independently certified as secure, allows you to send large files securely and doesn’t require lengthy training to use? Well it might be easier than you think, take a look at Egress Technologies Switch product. This is state of the art identity based encryption at it’s best and firmly puts you back in control of your data. As winner of the 2013 UK IT Industry Awards, Cloud Provider of the Year it has a lot to offer
In Summary
We can’t continue to ignore the threats posed to our IP and proprietary information when we share files containing this type of data. Most firms go to inordinate lengths to protect data stored within their network and then throw the doors open to abuse when we share data with colleagues, clients and business partners. It is essential that you remain in control of your valued data even when it’s left the confines of your network. If you thought that that was impossible, think again. Dare I say “you should make the Switch”? Definitely do your research, stop exchanging data in an unprotected way, take back control.
