If I were to ask you, what is the most important thing in your life? Most of you would answer, your loved ones.
If I said, assume your loved ones are safe and sound, sitting on a beach in Aruba, but there is a disaster happening at your house, right now. Fire, or maybe even more invasively, a burglary. What would you be most concerned about? I think most of you would say, your memories, and some would say your critical files and information.
It is no different for the companies you work for. In your work life, the most important assets you have are your people and your data. Back to the home scenario; if I were to ask you how, when and where you are most concerned for your loved ones, memories and critical information, you would likely say: “what a silly question, All the Time, Everywhere and in Every situation.” When you think about work assets, we believe the answers to those questions are the same; you need your assets protected all of the time and in every situation, regardless of where they are.
Let’s start with the people, just like your loved ones, you never want your people to be attacked, get a virus or be frightened about which street or dark alley into which they should or should not venture. Now let’s think about information….data. Just as in your home life, how you generate your data and where you use or consume your data has drastically changed in recent years. At home, you were tied to physical photos, paper files, and largely kept your important data locked in a file box or safety deposit box. Today, your photos are digital, your data is on many different devices and is almost exclusively digital. The same is true for your work life. How many of you work outside of the office at least once a week? According to the Dell Future Workforce study in 2016, that number is 52 percent. Ten years ago, or even five, the number of you who did so would have been far less – almost approaching zero.
As your employees use more diverse devices, work from almost anywhere, and expose themselves to physical and digital theft scenarios, you need protections in place to help protect your critical assets – and allow you to sleep at night. Your data must be protected at the point of creation, and stay protected when they are shared with partners, or even when they fall into the wrong hands. Wouldn’t you like to have visibility into where your data is being used, by whom, where and on what device?
It is now possible to protect data to the file level – and not just when they are at rest on a device inside the network, but also when they’re in motion or in use, and sent outside of the corporate network. Imagine that your marketing team was working with a group of contractors and had to send information about future products to this group in order to develop launch materials. Now your upcoming product strategy is in the hands of temporary external workers. Risky, right? So what if you were able to control that data, determine who has access, apply policies and monitor the activity. This can be as general or as granular as you would like. For example, you want these contractors to have access to these documents to do the work, but when their contract was up next month, set an expiry so they can no longer access them after that date. You can also restrict cutting and pasting, printing or forwarding onwards. Feel more in control? This can all be done without hindering productivity.
Dell Data Guardian is the next generation of file-level data encryption. It does exactly what I’ve described above – give organizations control and visibility over their data in addition to protecting it. Companies today need to be able to control who gets access to their data, monitor where the data is and how it is used, and be able to apply rights and policies so that only the right people can access it under the right circumstances. We are here to help. This is what we do every day.
For more information, go to http://datasecurity.dell.com
