Collaboration apps like Avaya Equinox with Zang Spaces, Alcatel Lucent Rainbow, and RingCentral Glip have all delivered fantastic upgrades to the world of business productivity. These simple and effective cloud services bridge the gap between experts within a team, allowing them to collaborate without worrying about the boundaries of geographical borders.
With the right collaboration tools, you can share files, annotate documents, and even engage in video conferences within a matter of moments. Of course, there is a catch. Sharing documents and files through the cloud also forces you to think carefully about your security, privacy and compliance strategies, and how you can protect both your business and your customers. Whether you're a hospital concerned about HIPAA and protecting patient data or a European business bound by the laws of GDPR, compliance must come before collaboration.
So, how do you launch a secure strategy?
1. Start with a Policy
Policies are critical for a successful and compliant collaboration strategy. You'll need to create documents that cover every detail of what your users can and can't do with their collaboration stack. This means covering what kind of information they can share, and where information needs to be stored. Highlight:
- Which documents can be shared externally and internally
- Who can be invited to group meetings and conferences
- Which access requirements will be implemented like two-factor authentication
Depending on how complex your policies are, you may need to implement security and privacy training sessions for some members of your team.
2. Choose Services with the Right Security Features
Most collaboration tool providers have various security and privacy solutions built into their systems, to help reduce the concerns that you and your IT team have to face when implementing a new service. You can browse through the available features that each potential provider offers, including the certifications they have to prove that they're compliant with standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS.
At a minimum, your collaboration solution should at least include an enterprise-grade encryption strategy which keeps your data secure both "in motion" and "at rest." For instance, RingCentral Glip provides robust security measures throughout every level of their collaboration app.
3. Be Proactive with Permissions
As well as in-depth encryption solutions, most collaboration tools will include with further features that provide IT teams with more control over the way their users access these services. For instance, there may be options like single sign-on, two-factor authentication, and more. Make sure that the collaboration service you choose has plenty of admin features to help provide your IT team with complete control over who gets access to what data.
