With data privacy and governance rules that seem to get stricter each year, today’s businesses and organizations need to be more diligent than ever with their content. At the same time, the fast pace of business, technology and customer behavior requires content to be shared at record pace.

When an organization needs to share sensitive or confidential information with an outside source, be it a client, vendor or customer, things can get complicated. Organizations need to make this information accessible to the intended participants, while also putting in effort to preserve privacy and security – for the organization’s own benefit, and to stay in compliance with current industry laws, standards and regulations.

Finding a solution that meets your security and accessibility needs can be a tough balancing act. Many file sharing methods offer convenience at the expense of security and privacy, or the other way around.

However, secure file sharing technologies allow businesses to toe this line with ease – with a simple click of a button, you’re able to share files with others, while gaining the peace of mind of knowing your file sharing activity can be monitored and logged for auditors later.

While security of sensitive content is increasingly a concern, many organizations still rely on traditional ways of sharing files, opening up potential vulnerabilities.

A popular method for sharing information that’s centuries old. Still, paper can get easily lost in the shuffle of day-to-day business operations, which is especially troublesome when dealing with sensitive or confidential information. Paper documents containing sensitive information can also be harder to permanently delete, usually requiring secure shredding services for proper disposal.

Although you may be able to password-protect an attached file (depending on the application you use to create it,) emails themselves can’t be password protected. They can be encrypted (in other words, “scrambling” the message in transit so would-be interceptors can’t read it) but this by no means implies the content is secure once it reaches its destination.

This is especially true since emails received generally don’t have an expiration date – they can stay on a machine or server indefinitely unless deleted by a user or administrator. Even without these concerns, email attachments usually have file size limits, so the document you’re sending might simply be too large to share this way in the first place.

Another option for sharing files is using an FTP server. Think of it as a network drive with a very specific way of moving files to and from it – the actual file transfer protocol itself.

On its own, FTP does not provide many built-in security features, or a way to track and monitor user activities being performed. The traditional FTP protocol doesn’t support encryption either, which means outside parties may be able to read or intercept data being sent. Your IT department may be able to create custom settings and features to make up for this lack of built-in security, however that’s only if you own the server, and would require heavy lifting as far as time and resources to make happen.

Secure file sharing software offers a more locked-down alternative to paper and email, while still being easy and convenient to use. It also provides powerful security without the need for extensive infrastructure or IT resources:

For organizations where protecting sensitive information is a priority, it’s practically essential to add secure file sharing software as part of your enterprise toolkit. Laserfiche’s secure file sharing feature, direct share, gives you the ability to share information securely, internally and externally, as part of Laserfiche’s robust enterprise content management platform.

Interested in seeing how Laserfiche can provide a way to manage your documents while supporting information governance efforts? Schedule a demo to learn more.