Large Attachment Problem – Resorting to Consumer File Sharing Can Be eDiscovery and Compliance Risk

Posted by Gary Cooke on October 8 2015

Data size is growing day by day. Large attachments have been a problem for corporate users and enterprise IT both. IT restricts the size of attachments to control the growth of (costly) storage and to keep the Exchange/Domino servers efficient. Bloated mailboxes affect the efficiency of mail clients like Outlook and Lotus Notes.

Dropbox for Large Size Files - eDiscovery and Compliance Risk

Consumer file sync and share solutions like Dropbox, Yousendit/Hightail, Google Drive, OneDrive (and even Box), are freely available. There is no doubt that they are great solutions for consumers as they offer an elegant user experience with the availability of sharing files across multiple devices – anytime, anywhere. This makes them attractive alternatives to email attachments for the sharing of files and creating Shadow-IT.

End-users are unaware of the security, data loss and compliance risks their company may face, and its impact on their own personal and work life. One of those such risks is through eDiscovery.

Let’s say your company gets into litigation and you become a party to this. You having a consumer file sharing account (at one time or another) may make your personally-owned computers, mobile phones and tablets targets of eDiscovery – because prima-facie you may have used say your Dropbox account to synchronize files and folders from your company-provided device to your personally-owned device . This may get you into a not-so-good situation.

So consumer solutions like Dropbox are fantastic for personal use. But corporate users and organizations need to be aware of the risks associated with Shadow-IT in case of litigation.

It is important that your company has strict policies with respect to the usage of consumer file sharing solutions such that end-users do not mix their personal and work data/applications. At the same time, to keep them productive, it is important to provide them with an enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) as Enterprise-Dropbox (Dropbox Alternative), FTP Replacement with the ability to automatically replace large sized attachments of Outlook and Lotus Notes. With this, enterprise IT can ensure that all company information is fully auditable and trackable in the eDiscovery process while still reaping the benefits of secure file sharing solutions.

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Topics: Compliance, enterprise file sharing, Enterprise File Sync & Share, Dropbox Alternative, Shadow-IT, Dropbox Replacement, Enterprise Dropbox, eDiscovery, Outlook Plugin, data governance

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