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Why Eliminating Silos Between Departments Reduces Risk

Silo photo

All it takes is one slip up to put your business—and your customers, partners, and vendors—at risk for a security breach. Unfortunately, manual error is one of the most common causes of security risk. This risk isn’t contained to only InfoSec teams or IT departments, either. Every department or person in an organization with contact to an external server (essentially, everyone in an organization) is at risk for making a manual mistake.

Eliminating silos to reduce risk

There are a few common scenarios where employees could unconsciously put private information at risk. Sharing data that could be deemed common or unimportant by one organization, such as a user’s login information having issues on the platform, could lead to risk. Let’s say a user submits a service ticket with their issue. While the customer account representative is trying to solve the issue, she shares this information with a product team resource over their internal messaging platform. The user’s information is now out there in the cloud with little to no control over who can access it down the road.

While one user may not seem like the most significant issue, what if this kind of information pertained to an entire organization or vendor payer resource? All it takes is one chink in the secure armor of an organization’s security protocols for malicious threats to fight their way inside.

Tips for eliminating silos between departments

Here are a few ways modern organizations can proactively close the gaps in data sharing between departments to reduce the risk for security threats:

  • Make security a corporate initiative. When every department knows precisely how to manage private information, share data with other internal stakeholders, and what to do when a risk occurs, your entire organization can be more confident in its security.
  • Invest in encrypted technology. Most modern organizations rely on inter-departmental messaging services to communicate. If your team must share private information, ensure your technology is fully encrypted and private. Just make sure you’re also educating your employees on best practices when sharing private information.
  • Open up access to critical data. If the same kind of secure information is being shared repeatedly (login data, for example), it may make sense to set up a private, secure Sharepoint or Dropbox site where multiple departments can house information. That way, employees simply have to look for the info they need instead of asking employees to share it with them in a way that could put the organization at risk.

Using cloud-based solutions to eliminate silos

One of the easiest ways for teams and departments to optimize transparency is to leverage cloud-based technology to share information efficiently. With a platform like the Whistic vendor risk management solution, your team can share vendor security controls, publish security documentation, and gather the resources you need to educate your employees on what secure information sharing looks like.

You can learn more about the Whistic platform here.

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