#dropbox security

Seamless User Experience—People use (and love) Dropbox because of its simplicity and ease of use. Don’t let the encryption solution negate this powerful trait! Users should still be able to share at the click of a button, and for the administrators, it shouldn’t put a drag on Dropbox’s lightening fast performance.

Key Management & Ownership—Yes, key management.  The secret sauce! To be fully secure, keys should reside with the owner of the information—not Dropbox, and not the security vendor. We like to call this ‘tapproof’.  Why is this important?  For anyone to access your user’s files (think federal law enforcement agency), you have to grant explicit permission. Or what about your company’s sensitive IP?  Without tapproof security, files could inadvertently be shared and be out of your control.

Robust Security—The obvious one, but one to be sure you don’t overlook. Be sure that the platform you select uses the highest security standards & encryption algorithms, like 256-bit AES.  Does it provide remote wipe capabilities? Can someone in your organization mandate password complexity requirements?  And be sure that the solution is hosted by a vendor with a deep history & foundation of encryption.  Protecting your sensitive documents is nothing to skimp on.

Auditing & Control for Compliance—Of course, you will want a simple way to have visibility into the activity of your users, to ensure compliance.  What are the reporting capabilities? Will they meet your internal and external compliance policies? Can you revoke access privileges, in the event an employee leaves the company or access levels change?

Read how 1 company deployed a solution

Ignore It—the ‘bury your head in the sand’ approach (not recommended!). Because employees are using it anyway, this leaves the organization prone to information leaking out.

Ban it—This certainly is an option that many IT groups today are taking. However, this really does take away a vital way that employees can work across multiple devices when out of the office, not to mention the ease of collaboration with colleagues it allows.

Manage it—with proper safeguards and policies in place, this is what we recommend for IT organizations to adopt. 

Which leads to the question: How do you effectively enforce controls on Dropbox usage, and do so without compromising the ease and productivity of the user experience? 

Check out SafeMonk.  SafeMonk encrypts folders within an employee’s Dropbox account to ensure your critical corporate data stays safe. Try SafeMonk for Enterprise free for 30 days! 

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Enterprise Security Management for Dropbox: True Utopia

1) Usage of Cloud Storage: Think Dropbox and iCloud

2) Opening Documents in Third-party Apps: Opening docs on your personal or work iPhone in Dropbox or Evernote

3) Sending Company Data over Personal Email: (self-explanatory)

4) Using File Transfer Apps: Employees get an error when trying to send files more than 40 megabytes

5) Personal USB Thumb Drives, Smartphones, and Tablets: Sending work IP to these personal devices

6) Data and IP Theft: Former employees taking company data with them after they leave

The list he gave is a pretty accurate overview of the no-no’s we all do in the workforce in order to get our jobs done quickly and with as little roadblocks in our way as possible. Sure, IT could put policies in place to avoid this (even if you think your company doesn't have a policy already, you are probably wrong), but we as productive workers, will always find a way around the policy or application blockage. 

The goal is to be security and risk aware. The fellow Monks and I recently had to take part in a security awareness training series. Admittedly, we all rolled our eyes and proclaimed "we are a security company; we understand the risks of our behavior!" However, even the most knowledgeable of us need to be "enlightened" from time-to-time, and reminded of those risks we consider to be common sense. 

From an IT perspective, in addition to policy or awareness training, it is important to move with and not against your workforce. For instance, if your concern is employees using their personal cellphones or tablets for work emails and documents, then mandate that certificates be placed on those devices. Or, instead of banning employees from using Cloud Storage, like Dropbox, find a security provider that will integrate with those solutions and allow you to apply a security layer, like SafeMonk J.

Collaboration, of course 

It’s accessible anywhere

Dropbox is ‘off the shelf’ and provides its own infrastructure, meaning 1 less thing that IT has to manage internally

Employees know how to use it, it’s easy, and they are using it anyway

More functionality is being provided from Dropbox like SSO for security

Auditing controls

Add on encryption functionality from companies like SafeMonk, which provides an additional layer of security for the Enterprise as well as monitoring capabilities, and it becomes a no-brainer. 

So help your IT department become the Superhero they want to be!  Share SafeMonk with them and have them try out the SafeMonk for Enterprise.  Soon they will be saving the world, 1 Dropbox account at a time.