Never has there been a better litmus test for seeing how agile your business is than responding to a pandemic. A recent survey by leading research firm Gartner confirmed that most businesses will shift some employees to remote work permanently as a result of COVID-19. Even from home, employees need to collaborate securely with colleagues, partners and customers to stay productive and meet deadlines and goals. While video chat and instant messaging lets you communicate, a lot of collaboration is through documents. Ideally you want to easily share documents, make sure everyone is working on the most recent version, and be able to securely manage all your projects. With the major shift to working at home, the time to double down on data security is now.
Deploying a collaboration environment on the fly is not something you can do overnight, since it costs both time and money. The fastest way to hit the ground running and share files without losing valuable time is to use a cloud-based system with a web interface. This keeps projects on track with minimal disruption.
A key ingredient to secure collaboration is not burdening your employees or third parties with making security decisions. Wrapsody eCo is a secure and reliable collaboration platform that encrypts all shared files and makes it easy to collaborate securely. By configuring workgroups with built-in policies and permission management, your employees continue to work without worrying if decisions don’t follow policy. You can also set an expiration date for your projects or revoke access to documents immediately, which simplifies security for users. They have a job to do and don’t need to worry about setting security policies.
Users can easily create a workgroup for a project and define security parameters, like permissions on downloaded files or view access to a document in a browser. Project managers can invite employees, partners and customers to the workgroup with a few clicks. As project members upload documents, they are automatically shared with the workgroup. Each workgroup has a centralized policy making it easier to enforce security on all documents.
As people work from home, they may fall into bad habits like downloading documents from protected cloud applications to work on locally. This is especially true if they do it out of frustration because the internet is slow or they are having problems with their VPNs. That could also lead to emailing files, only exacerbating unsafe data handling practices. Secure in the Wrapsody eCo environment, downloading documents locally is a non-issue. When a user downloads a file, they can only open it if they have access permissions. If someone accidentally sends the file to an unauthorized user, it is still protected because the unauthorized user will not be able to view the contents.
The other challenge with collaboration is ensuring project members are working on the latest document. If you are updating a financial spreadsheet, for example, you can’t work on an old version. With Wrapsody eCo, you always work on the current version. As soon as you update the file and close it, it automatically syncs to a central location. The next time you open it, you get the latest version, secure in the knowledge that your data is protected and only available to authorized users.
Working remotely may become standard for a lot people. Collaborating securely and effectively can ease the burden and ensure your data security controls protect your most sensitive information. And that should give you peace of mind.
Photo Credit: Graeme Butler
