The normal tension between facilitating work and securing data is significantly increased when executives or other employees travel to, or operate within, emerging markets. In these instances, local governments may control infrastructure through which intellectual property theft could be facilitated or malware could be distributed.
A large, multi-national pharmaceutical company has a broad, C-level backed initiative to develop enhanced security controls that will securely enable the business to collaborate and operate in emerging market geographies. China and Russia are the starting points given their importance to the company’s growth and the heightened level of cyber threats that exist.
This iniative has several components, including improved security operations that moves the organization towards a zero-trust architecture and a new secure travel process to prevent data loss when employees travel to emerging market geographies. Another, and the focus of this success story, is the secure sharing of data with in-market vendors, government agencies and other external parties.
After conducting stakeholder interviews to understand how sensitive data is currently shared through a mix of email, USB devices, and WeChat as well as an evaluation of the inherent risks to each, the organization decided to implement eShare to apply a uniform set of controls to externally shared files, using the organizations existing collaboration tools and cloud file storage (i.e. Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint Online).
The use cases range from procurement sending RFPs to suppliers, compliance reports sent government auditors, and employee data shared with payroll providers. Key to the selection of eShare was the:
- ability to share information, without giving data away (e.g. online viewing and editing, with no right to download),
- reliability of the links to shared files...i.e. no link blocking, even by the Great Firewall of China, and
- user’s ability to continue sharing files via email and the new ability to share files from OneDrive and SharePoint Online, eliminating data duplication.