It’s essential that you fully secure collaboration activities within your organization, including all communications. It’s also important that your organization comply with all applicable data privacy regulations, which require you to secure all data and communications involving customer data.
The best way to secure the data and communications within your organization is to embrace end-to-end encryption (E2EE). E2EE ensures enterprise collaboration and compliance — across your entire organization.
Why Enterprises Need End-to-End Encryption
The threats to enterprise data are significant and impacted by the rise in remote collaboration. According to the CyberEdge Group’s 2021 Cyberthreat Defense Report, the number of successful cyberattacks grew by 5.5% from 2019 to 2020. During the same period, the average cost of a data breach increased by 10%.
The rapid growth of the remote workforce during the COVID pandemic increases the threat level, as remote workers need to collaborate with each other, often over less-secure Wi-Fi networks. Many remote workers took the situation into their own hands by embracing consumer-grade communications solutions. IDC notes that 55% of these collaborative applications are “unauthorized” by employers.
To guard against these rising threats, enterprises need a secure collaboration solution that utilizes end-to-end encryption. Unfortunately, most unauthorized consumer collaboration apps do not use E2EE and put the enterprise at greater risk than ever before.
6 Strategies for E2EE Enterprise Collaboration and Compliance
E2EE is an important tool for securing your organization’s collaborative activities and ensuring compliance with data privacy laws. Here are six key strategies to embrace when adopting an E2EE solution, such as Wickr.
Perform a Data Audit
Before you employ E2EE, you need to know what data and activities you need to protect. That requires performing a thorough data audit to determine the following:
- What data you own
- Where that data is stored
- Who has access to that data
- How that data is accessed and shared
- Which aspects of that data are necessary to ensure regulatory compliance
Create a Strategy for Compliant Collaboration
Once you have a good grasp of the data in your possession, you need to create a compliant collaboration strategy to guide your employees’ behavior. It’s likely that many (if not most) employees are not aware of all the compliance issues your organization faces, or of how they put data at risk by seemingly harmless activities. It’s your responsibility to detail how your employees can and should communicate and share data with each other, then train them on best practices. Your strategy should spell out:
- What documents can be shared
- Who they can share documents with
- How they should access those documents
- What they need to do to protect sensitive consumer data
Employ Zero-Trust to Control Data Access
Just having a strategy in place doesn’t ensure that it will be followed. You can further protect your communications and file sharing by employing a zero-trust model for data access. Zero-trust restricts data access to only those individuals that need that data. With zero-trust, there is no universal access for anyone in your enterprise, no matter their position or title. Limiting the number of people who have access to any single document or communication reduces the number of potentially vulnerable access points and significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access.
Manage Compliance During Collaboration
Data security is a key component of data privacy, but it’s just one component. To ensure compliance with the growing number of data privacy regulations, you need to focus on compliance during all collaborative activities. That requires doing the following:
- Detail who in your enterprise is responsible for compliance management
- Inform all employees of compliance requirements — and periodically audit their activities for compliance
- Employ the necessary software tools to monitor compliance across the enterprise
Encrypt All Data at Rest and In Transit
Finally, it’s essential for your enterprise to encrypt all data, both at rest and in-transit. While traditional client-server encryption might be adequate for protecting data at rest, you need end-to-end encryption to protect data in transit — as well as all company communications.
The advantage of E2EE is that it ensures that data is never unencrypted. Even if a malicious actor gains unauthorized access to a privileged communication or a file being shared, that communication or data is unreadable because it’s fully encrypted. All data and communications are rendered unusable to anyone except for the intended recipient.
With the growing number of remote workers relying on remote file access and communication over insecure networks, a secure collaboration platform protected with E2EE is essential.
Let Wickr Help You Focus Your Enterprise on E2EE Collaboration and Compliance
To fully protect your workers’ collaborations and ensure regulatory compliance, turn to Wickr. Wickr’s secure collaboration solution employs robust end-to-end encryption and other military-grade security to ensure that text, voice, and video communications, as well as shared data files, are fully protected from unauthorized access. Wickr’s strong E2EE security ensures your employees’ collaborations are protected — and that you fully comply with all data privacy regulations.
Contact us today to learn more about Wickr’s E2DD collaboration and compliance solutions.