Companies today have almost negligible control when it comes to third party contractors and independent vendors accessing their internal information. In spite of a compliance and auditing processes, it can be challenging to supervise a third-party consultant’s operation on shared, sensitive and confidential documents. That is, until the arrival of digital rights management as a document security tool.
While trust is the foundation of daily life, it is even more imperative in today’s highly collaborative work surroundings. We depend on partners and colleagues to achieve organizational objectives. But to reduce the risks connected to high levels of trust between third parties and organizations, IT security departments must enforce specific document security tools and policies to supervise and discover unsafe user activity and suspicious data movement.
Some time ago, Dell revealed how third-party vendors are rapidly becoming the central entry points into large multinationals and organizations. Typically, the credentials used by third-party individuals would be just as secure as the parent company’s staff credentials. But, as was seen in the case of the Target debacle, this was not true. Way back in 2014, when Target reported a massive data breach that put personal credentials of over 70 million shoppers at risk, it was shocking to know how cybercriminals managed to gain access to the retailer’s systems. Hackers broke into the network systems of Target by assuming credentials from a third-party vendor that they had stolen. Although the data breach at Target took place due to a stolen identity, third-party vendors often stand at risk of a data breach either purposefully or carelessly.
In some cases, third-party contractors could have spiteful purposes and intentionally seek access to confidential and sensitive documents. But, even more dangerous, is accidental access to sensitive material from third-party employees, where they could seriously endanger organizational data without knowing that they did something wrong.
So how can organizations safeguard their documents from misuse by third-party vendors? According to experts, pre-screening third-party vendors is crucial in ensuring secure relations with an organization. The process that every organization must employ with independent consultants include:
- Does the contractor use multifactor authentication?
- What are the kinds of antivirus software and firewall measures used to protect internal data?
- Has a third-party vendor ever experienced a data breach before? And if yes, what was the cause?
- What is being done to avoid data breaches from taking place? What steps have been taken to prevent a data breach from occurring in the future, if it has happened before?
- What is the company’s IT security policies and procedures with regards to hiring employees and letting them go?
However, in spite of this pre-screening questionnaire, can an organization be assured that sensitive documents and data sent to third parties will be used responsibly? The answer to this is through digital rights management software where user activity can be carefully controlled and monitored.
Having the ability to control how a privileged user is acting with a particular document can massively reduce the amount of exposure of your data. A digital rights management gives you total control over what can be done with a data file you share with a third-party vendor. For example, you could prevent printing, stop copying and modifying, prevent print screen and screen grabbing tools from taking images of document content, and set expiry limits on how long a document can be viewed. Hence even if a third-party vendor accidentally tries to share confidential or sensitive information, they will be denied. Document security systems that use digital rights management can also be used to log how documents are used – when they were accessed, printed etc, by whom and from where. If any actions are perceived as malicious, it can provide critical forensic evidence to become the backbone for litigation.
It is essential to strike a balance between discovering risky actions early on and trusting individuals to do the right thing. While pre-screening processes and security policies alone may not solve the problem, when it comes to establishing visibility for early detection, or enforcing how documents can be used, then a digital rights management solution can hold the key. It is not easy for organizations to trust individuals with their sensitive information in and outside the workplace. On the other hand, to succeed in a competitive landscape, businesses require workforces to collaborate extensively and make use of critical corporate applications more than ever before. It can be easy to overlook the significance of verifying trust through technology that can offer context into user behaviour and provide visibility. But this exposes a company to the risk of losing its data that is sensitive to its business, consumers and staff. With a good document security solution that uses digital rights management to control access and use, companies can improve productivity and empower data security within and outside their organization.
