In an increasingly collaborative work environment, it’s more important now than ever before that your organization has the highest level of visibility and control possible over its data. While knowing how to choose the right data security solutions is a challenge in and of itself, the versatility of a Secure Collaboration tool could prove to be a fantastic starting point for many organizations. These are four ways your organization can utilize Secure Collaboration in its data security strategy.

Safely Collaborate in the Cloud

Being that the workplace is more dispersed than it’s ever been, cloud technologies have become an integral component of organizations’ digital transformations. More specifically, organizations are now taking advantage of cloud collaboration platforms like Box, Dropbox, and Sharepoint to make teamwork in remote environments easier and more realistic. Digital Guardian Secure Collaboration ensures files can be shared through these platforms securely by applying granular controls to the data and following it wherever it goes, meaning your sensitive data can only be seen, forwarded, and edited by those with specific permissions to do so.

Mitigate Compliance Risks

While your organization’s primary data security goal should be to prevent a data breach before one ever occurs, mistakes can still happen. When sensitive information is mistakenly sent to the wrong person or an employee’s credentials are compromised, for example, a breach can occur despite an organization’s best efforts to implement preventative measures. And for organizations that are required to comply with data security laws and regulations, these mistakes can be incredibly costly.

Thankfully, our solution has the ability to follow data wherever it travels with its always-on security. Access to any files containing PII, PCI, or PHI will always require authentication, and just in case sensitive information gets into the wrong hands, access can be revoked in real-time at the user level. This allows organizations to contain and mitigate breaches swiftly and prevent security incidents from growing into catastrophic events.

Apply Your Organization’s Data Security Policies to Your Data

Organizations create and share more data than they ever have before, and one of the first steps in protecting that data is understanding what types of data your organization has, how sensitive the information is, and the business value it holds. Data Classification solutions like Titus and Boldon James are an intuitive means of labeling an organization’s data, facilitating the location of specific data by end-users, and preventing data loss.

Because end-users handle so many different types of data, though, data security policy management can be a big hassle, and it can be deceivingly easy for employees to fail to follow proper procedures. By integrating one of our Data Classification solutions with Digital Guardian Secure Collaboration, end-users can have the power to apply encryption, granular access control, and policy management to documents and data at rest based on classification level.

Control Your Sensitive Data as It Travels

While it’s certainly important to protect your organization’s data at rest, securing sensitive data in transit is just as critical. Oftentimes, though, protecting data as it travels is much easier said than done—particularly without sacrificing efficiency. While utilizing a Managed File Transfer solution like GoAnywhere on its own would prove to be effective, combining this solution with our Secure Collaboration tool will take your data protection to the next level without hindering workflows.

HelpSystems' MFT Rights Management bundle goes beyond traditional file-level encryption by allowing end-users to automatically apply digital rights management to every file that lands within GoAnywhere MFT. Employees will not be required to install any software, never have to remember to apply protections, and can manipulate access controls even after files have been sent outside of the organization.

This post originally appeared on HelpSystems.com