"Corporate policies alone won't address the use of cloud storage services by employees" said Lucas Mearian, quoting his ComputerWorld article entitled "Mobile devices bring cloud storage -- and security risks -- to work." Employees use these services because they are convenient to store and access files remotely, not because they are secure. The more and more that IT notices sensitive information leaking onto cloud services, the more that they will be blacklisted in their firewalls.
Passing are the days when people burn files from work to a cd/dvd or store them on a USB drive. Many progressive (or paranoid) organizations are disabling USB ports on computers to discourage use of thumb drives. These same organizations are the ones blacklisting remote access to file sharing services like Dropbox, but the issue now is that if a user is blocked with one service, there are another dozen services out there that they can switch to, thus making the problem worse.
People WILL have access to their files remotely, from desktops or mobile devices, one way or another. This evolutionary use case won't go away. This is further supported by looking at IBM's progressive BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies.
The lack of governance around remote access to files is specifically an area that CloudPointe is addressing. Dropbox, Box and others are consumer oriented services, focusing on convenient sharing, with no care or concept of enterprise security or governance. Their model promotes data duplication, open sharing, and the redistribution of proprietary and sensitive content.
Ultimately every IT organization needs to determine the risk associated with having sensitive information sitting outside the firewall, not only for how loosely or tightly handled they are by employees, but also because your need to trust the multi-tenant vendor that stores it.
"You can use mobile device management platforms to help lock these applications down," said Dion Hinchliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group, a consultancy. "The other thing is, and this is more effective, [give] employees the applications you've blessed to do that."
CloudPointe recommends exactly this action: instead of letting employees set the pace of how information is shared outside of the enterprise, IT should take the lead and implement a "blessed" solution for employees to use, that is enterprise secure and helps manage governance.
CloudPointe Connect and CloudPointe Hub: Solutions for secure, enterprise file sharing focused on governance.
