Use Case
Manage external access to company documents
The Problem
It’s easier than ever for companies to collaborate on documents. It’s so easy that over time there are upwards of tens of thousands of external parties with access to company documents.
If access by these parties was tightly controlled and kept up to date, the risk would be low. But unfortunately with the limited capabilities of today’s tools, external access to company documents can persist for years. In fact, most companies don’t have complete visibility into which external accounts have access to what.
This leads to all sorts of problems, such as external access living on long after you’ve stopped working with a vendor or customer. Or, personal accounts being added to documents and slipping under the radar for years. You may lose valuable time trying to hunt down and remediate all of the issues that come with documents shared with these external accounts.
This happens more often than you think: our research shows that 60 percent of organizations only sometimes, rarely, or never revoke vendor access to shared information after they stop working with them.
These risks continue long after you’ve stopped collaborating with external parties but aren’t easy to find and fix using legacy tools.
The Solution
An ideal solution would enable you to easily see all company documents with external account access. This would include any and all personal email accounts as well as access by outside domains.
Next, you should be able to quickly fix the problem. You can efficiently select and take bulk remediation actions on hundreds to thousands and even millions of documents if necessary.
Finally, you should be able to automate these processes. You might set up rules that allow you to remove certain external account access after a period of time. For example, external access to documents and folders would expire after 90 days.
Or, you could have a workflow for employees that asks them to provide a business reason when they attempt to share a document with an external account. You can make sure your employees are always aware of who they are sharing with and why, and that you’re documenting that information, too.
By being able to easily find, fix, and automate your access control processes, your company information will be safer from issues related to external account sharing.