Sharing files is as simple as sending a link, and personal email accounts that shouldn’t have access to confidential documents can be added without IT teams knowing. In fact, over half of employees admit that they or a coworker have accidentally added their personal email accounts to company documents.
These personal email accounts usually have fewer protections than corporate accounts, leading to outsized security risks and headaches for admins. For example, a personal account could have access to a company file for months or years after the employee who owned it has left the organization.
IT and Security teams have zero to little visibility into this access, and fixes take up valuable time and resources.
Understand the scope of the problem
Identify risks through full visibility of personal account access.
To resolve issues with personal account access, companies must first understand the scope of their risks. With the right process and tooling, this should take almost no time and zero manual effort.
Create clear policies
Get stakeholder approval and ensure all employees understand security policies
Once a company has visibility into its personal account risk, it can begin creating policies. In our experience, policy creation is a process that requires conversations with key stakeholders, and, depending on a company’s size, a formal approval process.
Once policies have been aligned and approved, it’s important to make sure employees fully understand the policies they’ll be expected to abide by.
Educate and empower employees
Train employees and delegate processes to end-users to create a culture of security
Another key step to keeping company information secure is to train employees on risks and issues related to personal accounts. It’s vital to help employees first understand the problems so that they can take part in solutions.
Remediate problems and automate processes
Quickly fix issues through simple investigations and bulk remediation actions
A key step in the journey is cleaning up personal account access. However, without the right tooling and processes, this often takes lots of time and bandwidth for IT and Security teams.
Unauthorized or accidental access by personal accounts is one of the biggest risks companies deal with when keeping their sensitive data safe. And creating a culture of security and protecting company documents from this risk is not a simple task.
You can read more about Protecting Company Data From Personal Account Access here.
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