Why You are Doing File Sharing All Wrong
The Internet and file sharing tools have made communicating with documents much easier, faster, and effective. But how do you prevent your sensitive business documents from being leaked or re-shared?
The confidential pricing proposal you sent to a customer, the pitch deck you sent to an investor, the product launch plan that you sent to your retailers, somehow ended up in the hands of your competitor. If you can relate to any of these, or similar situations, you are not alone, and most likely, the leaked document was sent by you via E-mail attachment, or through a file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
So, what can you do to stop this?
In the aforementioned cases, the document that you sent was for the recipient to see, not to modify or use in some other way. According to surveys, this is true for over 90% of documents that are shared digitally.
The safest way to share documents online is to show them, not send them. By sharing the document as view-only, you can prevent the recipient from downloading it, and re-sharing it with others. Tools like our SecureMail allows you to convert E-mail attachments into view-only links that cannot be downloaded. Our SecureDrive cloud collaboration platform allows you to set files that are particularly sensitive to view-only, so that they do not get into the wrong hands.
Sounds simple, right? Then why do we still attach files to E-mails and hit send for them to be lost from our control forever? Bad habits are hard to break and changing long established workflows are not easy. That is why we designed SecureMail to integrate seamlessly into Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail so that the user experience is no different to attaching a file as an attachment.
Cost is another consideration. We provide a free tier for light users that allows them to create view-only links for their PDF and Microsoft Office files.
There is no reason why you should risk confidential or sensitive files being leaked or re-shared by sending the files when you don’t have to. Keep your data safe; show it don’t send it.