As an organization's IT Department, it is your job to protect company information, BUT...
...PROTECTING information and ENABLING users to do their jobs at the same time is really a balancing act.
If we look at the big picture:
- A company exists to make money and at the same time, contribute to society.
- The company can only meet or exceed revenue targets if the employees' IT tools let them work efficiently.
- Working efficiently often means working with external clients, partners, or vendors.
🔒 Your IT Department might be inclined to protect information by minimizing shareability outside the walls of the company. While this optimizes security, if it prevents people from working with external contractual parties, this will affect the company's earnings and will result in dissatisfaction with IT and the Google Workspace ecosystem that you worked so hard to deploy.
🔥🛠️ Moreover, employees are creative. If the company doesn't provide the approved channels they need to get their jobs done, they are likely to use unapproved software and personal Gmail addresses and other channels for sharing content with external contractual partners. This will result in IT entirely losing control over information flow; it will open up the company to information leaks — even permanently open leaks.
🔥🔓 In this way, too many protective measures can actually undermine the originally intended protection and CREATE the exact risks you were trying to avoid.
📃🔒 Companies need to formulate and enforce policies that protect information AND at the same time enable employees to do their work.
💎This information management area is KloudGem's strong suit: we have worked cross-functionally with IT, IT Security, Legal, Operations, and user teams to formulate optimal policies for internal and external collaboration, while keeping information security and control over the flow of information front of mind to minimize said risks.
🤝 This is the area where company policies and tech can strengthen one another to achieve the desired results. The key is coordinated internal cross-collaboration, with continuous improvement in mind.
