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Ensuring data protection, secure file sharing of personal data

Tallen Harmsen, managing director at Indigo Cube.

Johannesburg, 10 Jun 2021

In today's digital age, our personal data is constantly moving around and stored on various servers. We need to realise how the data is being handled, by whom, and how they are protecting it? Is there anything we can do to prevent companies from mishandling our personal information? Is there anything the companies can do? Yes, there is.

Why data protection is such a big issue?

Over the last few years, we have heard of many scandals of big corporations losing or leaking personal information of their customers. Luckily, due to these scandals, personal data protection is getting more and more attention and things are getting a little better. Or at least in some regions of the world. For example, thanks to GDPR, companies in the EU must handle personal information properly or face large fines, and locally in South Africa, the compliance deadline for POPIA is forcing companies to do the same.

To get an idea of how massive the leakage of personal data can be and how often it happens, read about the scandals that occurred just in 2020, where there were 2 935 publicly reported breaches in the first three quarters.

How are companies handling personal information?

The larger the company gets, the higher the risk of mishandling personal data gets. Each  employee has access to some registers with personal information, and they regularly need to send documents with this data to their co-workers and external entities.

Most employees shared documents using e-mails and, with the birth of cloud services, these same cheap and cheerful file share services that are by no means secure.

This leaves many companies to try to figure out a more secure way of sharing files. One of the main problems is that it is very expensive to develop and switching to more secure systems normally involves complexity and user frustration.

How can companies prevent this?

Ease of use

Like all things in life, if something is hard to use, people will find ways around it and finding a balance between simplicity and security is very important. This is where a secure managed file transfer can help by combining the easy-to-use experience, adopted by many cloud services, with the security and manageability required to keep the shared documents safe.

Automation

The more data that is transferred, the greater the security demand. The traditional methods of sharing information are not up to scratch for security and often cannot scale without introducing loads of complexity. This again leads to employees seeking out cheap and cheerful file share services that put the companies’ sensitive data at risk.

This is where automation can help by doing the heavy grunt work and reducing the inherent complexities. Automation takes away the need to conduct mundane tasks required to securely share information and reduces the need for human intervention because, as they say, “to err is human”.

Visibility

A quote by Desiderius Erasmus says it best: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

How can you expect to protect your sensitive information if you have no visibility on who is using it, how it has been used, and if the intended party received it successfully? Answering all these questions requires a consolidation of all file transfer activities into one easy-to-use system to allow for management control over the entire business and all the processes.

Conclusion

A secure manage file transfer system, like MOVEit, lets you manage, view, secure and control all file transfer activity through a single system. You will always know where your files are with predictable, secure delivery and extensive reporting and monitoring. It reduces the need for IT's hands-on involvement and allows for user self-service as needed. 

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