Securing Data in the Cloud

This blog is an excerpt from our recent Industry Perspective, “Securing Your Data in the Cloud.” To download the entire brief, click here.

When we think of data breaches, we might picture a TV plotline on shows like “Quantico” or real-life examples like Edward Snowden – where someone intentionally exposes sensitive information. But the reality is that anyone in an agency, ranging from top-clearance levels down to an entry-level worker, can intentionally or accidentally misuse or leak critical data.

This potential is increasing as new technologies put more information and power in the users’ hands. The complexity of governing, tracking and securing content and data has been magnified due to the growth of content-management systems like SharePoint, a business-critical tool that helps organizations place, store, organize and access information from almost any device in a secure manner.

SharePoint is a Microsoft Office tool that allows organizations to create websites and helps secure platforms to store, organize, share and access information from almost any device. This tool is particularly useful because it has a rules-based security model that controls everything within a SharePoint system, down to individual files. The system is also flexible and allows users to be assigned a mix of permission levels, granting them access to different SharePoint functions as well as content. This allows agencies to leverage users, content and permission levels in a variety of customizable ways.

The problem with SharePoint, however, is that it lacks a centralized way of defining or managing the application of permissions across an entire SharePoint farm (the connector of all installed SharePoint servers in your system).

In order to help agencies tackle these challenges, Metalogix offers solutions that integrate directly with SharePoint to help manage various permissions and content so that agencies can better monitor their SharePoint systems. Metalogix provides industry-recognized management solutions for mission-critical collaboration platforms. Its solutions are engineered to help you go beyond simply securing your agency’s data, be it in the cloud or on-premises.

One such solution is ControlPoint and Sensitive Content Manager, which can help your agency automatically detect sensitive content, like Personal Identifiable Information (PII), so that during cloud migration, you can easily compartmentalize this type of data from other files.

Combined, these tools help agencies better combat Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for sensitive content such as PII in SharePoint, both on-premise and in the cloud. Powered by advanced machine learning technologies, Metalogix ControlPoint and Sensitive Content Manager provide more accuracy for the filtering and classification of permissions and content. While other DLP solutions employ rules and techniques that make it too simple to find PII, Sensitive Content Manager provides more in-depth analysis of the true nature of your content.

Specifically, Metalogix’s ControlPoint and Sensitive Content Manager can help your agency:

• Detect the presence of PII. Sensitive Content Manager allows clients to identify, track and secure documents using advanced powered machine learning, which enables a higher level of contextual content awareness in complex enterprise environments.
• Take action. Upon detection of PII that could pose serious security threats, ControlPoint can alert, isolate or remove files that violate policy. ControlPoint can also customize workflows so that they easily enforce governance strategies while reducing the workloads on SharePoint administrators, content owners and compliance officers.
• Manage your content. With the addition of Sensitive Content Manager, your SharePoint administrators can manage your agency’s content in real time. Administrators can use on-demand scanning, flag specific libraries, sites or site collections for content discovery or enable a real-time content shield to perform analysis of files as they are created, modified, moved or destroyed.

Imagine someone in your agency trying to access a piece of data that he’s not supposed to, or trying to download more files than he usually does. Now, imagine that your SharePoint systems could identify any unusual activity outside of an employee’s normal behavior – and actually stop this type of data misuse in its tracks.

That hypothetical is now a reality. We live in an era where an agency’s data system, like SharePoint, can actually monitor individual behavior and halt any activity that falls outside an individual’s norm or clearance level. That is the future with Metalogix.

As government agencies continue to move their content to the cloud and administration systems like SharePoint, Metalogix will be there to help agencies navigate the process. Securing data and content has become more of a challenge in an age of increased collaboration, flexibility and innovation in the cloud. While threats may increase in complexity, government can rest assured that it has the available tools to tackle current and future security challenges.