Your Sensitive Data Will Be Shared, So Make Sure It’s Secure

When you think of data breaches, you probably think of anonymous attackers tapping into your secure network via malware and accessing confidential data from afar. But a new Dell survey shows that an equally concerning threat may exist right within your walls.

The Dell End-User Security Survey recently found that 72 percent of employees are willing to share confidential, regulated or sensitive data under certain circumstances. It’s not always because they’re careless, and it’s typically not because they’ve gone rogue. Rather, there are simply a number of scenarios in which it makes good business sense to share sensitive data.

What’s troubling is not so much that employees are sharing data, it’s how they’re going about it. Today’s workforce is more mobile and collaborative than ever, and employees are engaging in risky behaviors simply to stay productive. More than half of employees (56 percent) use public cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and others for sharing or backing up their work. When sharing confidential files with third-party vendors or consultants, nearly half (45 percent) use email, while one-third (31 percent) say these outside parties have access to their company’s intranet or other internal information system. Target learned the riskiness of the latter approach firsthand when the company was breached thanks to a gap in its HVAC vendor’s security.

Many companies understand the need to protect their information where it’s stored, but if you’re not also protecting it when it is being shared or used, you’re still opening yourself up to the risk of disastrous and expensive breaches.

That’s why we created Dell Data Guardian. Data Guardian protects, controls and monitors data wherever they go. This is a solution that we developed in-house to solve a big problem in the market today. It provides file-level encryption and enterprise digital rights management to protect data when they’re in motion or in use without hindering workers’ ability to collaborate and be productive. Further, it also provides IT with the ability to control who gets access to the data, apply policies, and monitor the data activity and location even when they are outside of the corporate network.

Want to see how this works in practice? This video will walk you through it:

We launched Dell Data Guardian in December 2016, and we’re continuing to innovate and strengthen the solution. We look forward to sharing those developments with you as we release new updates. Today, we’re pleased to introduce two usability improvements that make secure sharing of information easier for file creators and recipients.

• Data Guardian now makes it easy to authorize new recipients when emailing files, keeping your data secure no matter where they go. Through an Outlook plug-in, Data Guardian enables senders to grant access to addressees in an email. Before access is granted, the file sender sees a pop-up to verify the action, protecting against unwarranted file access.
• With Data Guardian, users can painlessly extend the reach of their secure collaboration, while staying in control. External users who receive a file protected with Data Guardian but do not have authorization rights will receive an automatically-generated link to request access. This request will go back to the original file creator – not necessarily the person who may have forwarded the file – ensuring that only those who should receive access are quickly granted it. All this activity is logged in the Dell Data Security Management Server, giving the file owner continuous visibility as the file is shared onwards.

We’re excited about what these updates mean for our customers and their need to protect critical data wherever they go. To learn more about Dell’s full portfolio of security solutions, including Dell Data Guardian, please visit our Data Security web site.