How secure is your business? Many people will answer this question confidently. After all, security issues are only highlighted when there’s a breach. But in truth, there are countless problems simply waiting to happen.
This is something that’s underlined by Varonis’ Global Data Risk Report, which found that a massive 58% of businesses have over 100,000 folders open to everyone within their business. In this post, we’ll dig a little deeper into the findings, their implications for security and how to protect your business.
Varonis’ Global Data Risk Report details findings from data risk assessments on 130 organisations across a variety of industry segments and sizes. Overall, they found that 21%of folders across all participating organisations were open to everyone. They also found that 58% of the businesses assessed had more than 100,000 folders open to everyone.
But these aren’t just your workaday files and folders. Perhaps most shocking is that 41% of business had over 1,000 sensitive folders open to everyone. That means they have files which they acknowledge contain sensitive information, but still they’re doing nothing to stop unauthorised access.
According to the report, sensitive files include those that “contain credit card information, health records, or personal information subject to regulations like GDPR, HIPAA and PCI.”
This highlights a number of issues for the companies that aren’t restricting access .For one, this information can be valuable to your company. If it gets into the wrong hands, it could be used to help competitors. Or it could simply be tampered with or deleted to your detriment.
On a more serious note, personal information and payment details could be used to commit fraud and steal from your customers. With companies taking up to 2 years to restore their reputation after a data breach, it’s fair to say this could be disastrous for your business.
Finally, there’s the legal side of things. With GDPR, HIPAA and PCI all affected by the files in the Varonis report, your business could be in breach of compliance standards and be subject to a fine or even prosecution. In other words, open files are no laughing matter.
It’s clear that businesses need to restrict access to avoid financial loss and reputation damage. But with so many different file types, staff members and authority levels, that can seem like an insurmountable task using a standard computer or cloud storage solution.
Thankfully, digital asset management provides a suite of features that tick every box. iBase’s sophisticated security model enables several different levels of access so you can specify exactly who, or which type of employees, can use specific files or groups of assets. That’s broken down further in to uploading, viewing, editing, downloading and sharing.
It’s all hosted in Amazon’s secure AWS cloud environment, which is continuously tested for security. Our own penetration checks bolster this security to give you complete peace of mind that your assets meet the latest PCI guidelines.
Want to find out more about how iBase can improve security for your files and assets? Feel free to get in touch with our team. Alternatively, you can try the powerful features for yourself with a free Express account, complete with 1GB of storage.
