Page 117 - Cyber Defense eMagazine January 2023

Securing Collaboration at the Speed of Business

By Ofer Klein, CEO and Co-Founder, Reco

Recent research found that 96% of business leaders believe that effective communication is key to a
productive remote or hybrid work. And Slack claims that using collaboration tools can increase your
productivity by 30%. All of these tools offer vast benefits – it’s easy to see why they’re so appealing to
businesses. They make collaboration faster and easier – which is a leading goal for almost any
organization.

However, they also introduce new security and compliance risks. Organizations must find a balance
between speed, productivity and security when it comes to collaboration. Doing nothing isn’t an option.
The hack of Uber’s Slack channel is just one recent example that underscores the importance of
collaboration security.

However, legacy security tools, such as DLP, were built to control and, in some cases, prevent
communication. That won’t suffice for today’s modern business. You can’t stop business communication
and still collaborate effectively. Fortunately, there are new approaches to collaboration security that mean
you don’t have to choose. Dynamically classifying sensitive information across collaboration tools and
understanding what actions are justified, are key to effective collaboration security.

Understanding the security needs of collaboration tools

The commonality with collaboration tools is that they run on data – you’re sharing information, documents
and data – some of which is sensitive and subject to certain compliance regulations.

These platforms were built to allow users to share information seamlessly, putting collaboration first.
Users share documents with each other without thinking about how sensitive the information in some of
those documents might be. There’s a risk that an unauthorized party could get in and access these
documents and that information. It's easy to share information through collaboration tools in an unsafe
manner – for instance, with a link open publicly or data still shared with a third party that you don't work
with anymore.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – January 2023 Edition 117
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