When searching for security solutions for your organization, it may be easy to assume your solutions need to be unique to your data, your employees, and your industry; and you wouldn’t be wrong in your assessment. Choosing the right security solutions that are financially sustainable, integrate with your current solution(s), and streamline rather than obstruct workflows can mean opting for vastly different ones compared to your closest competitors. What nearly every modern organization has in common today, though, is that they create and share more data than they ever have before.

Organizations’ desire to make collaboration and the transfer of data in general as seamless and efficient as possible has only increased in recent years, and the rapid transition to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified that desire. But just because collaboration is becoming easier and more automated does not necessarily mean your data is becoming more secure. While data classification solutions can help identify and give context to your data and secure managed file transfer solutions can encrypt that data and streamline transfer processes, organizations often find their data and its protection are out of their control once it leaves their network or the bounds of their MFT tool.

This is where the concept of secure data sharing comes into the equation for many of these organizations. Like with other types of security solutions, however, data tracking can serve different purposes depending on the types of data your organization handles and the situation in which the data tracking is employed. Organizations can help to solve these three commonly faced security challenges by tracking their data.

Secure Data Sharing Gives Organizations Better Visibility Over Employee Activity

One of the most fundamental components of secure data sharing is data tracking, and a common issue organizations frequently face when they don’t track their data is a general lack of visibility. Data tracking allows organizations to keep their sensitive data protected by knowing where it’s located, how it’s being handled, who can access it, and who those people are sharing it with.

Without proper data visibility, it can become quite difficult to monitor how well (or how poorly) your organization’s employees are following the company’s corporate data security policies, thus making those policies more difficult to consistently enforce. If one or several of your employees are actively practicing bad security hygiene, without data tracking, your organization’s security team may fail to identify those bad practices until a data breach occurs. In this way, data tracking can be seen as a preventative measure with its objective being to prevent a breach before one ever occurs.

Secure Data Sharing Allows Better Data Policy Oversight Across Organizations

While it’s one thing to ensure proper visibility over your own employees, ensuring the same level of visibility once sensitive data leaves your organization is a challenge of its own. Oftentimes, IT and security executives will find that they’re able to maintain healthy data security practices within the bounds of their organization, but when their data leaves the organization, proper control over its access and handling is lost.

Organizations are sharing more information than ever before and, as time goes on, it’s safe to assume more organizations will aim to establish more collaborative data ecosystems. According to TechRadar, such organizations that choose to embrace these ecosystems have the potential to save up to 9% of their annual revenue over the next several years. More collaborative environments make organizations more productive, create savings, and add revenue.

With more data sharing, however, comes more security risk. Thankfully, some of that risk can be alleviated by practicing secure data sharing. While corporate data security policy compliance can sometimes be encouraged, monitored, and enforced within your organization with methods besides data tracking like continued education and training, once the data leaves the organization, it becomes far more difficult to know whether or not it is being handled according to your corporate standards. No matter who may hold your data in their hands, employing solutions that make use of secure data sharing practices like data tracking, access privilege control, multi-factor authentication, and end-to-end encryption will give you and your organization more power over your data anywhere and anytime.

Secure Data Sharing Can Prevent a Breach Before One Ever Occurs

Even after employing a solution that tracks your organization’s data to ensure your employees and partners are handling it with care, accidents can still happen. The reality of collaboration is that, beginning the moment your sensitive data leaves the organization, it becomes more susceptible to a breach.

While data tracking on its own may not be enough to stop a breach from happening, organizations can take advantage of it to better understand where, why, and how a breach occurred. Gaining such information can be instrumental in preventing more breaches from occurring in the future, particularly if the original breach was caused by human error.

Gaining information from a breach can help you to know where your data security strategy may have gone wrong, but the goal of expanding on data tracking by  implementing more comprehensive data sharing solutions should be to prevent a costly data breach before one ever occurs. At HelpSystems, we firmly believe our secure data sharing solutions can do just that.