Posted by Tim Luzadder, TCC Enterprise Infrastructure Director
Unless you’re blocking Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, you can bet employees are using those services today as part of their normal office workflows. Drive solutions aren’t the only place you can find your corporate data either. Services for collaboration like Slack also allow repositories for its members. Employees are using these services to meet a need they have, most commonly, convenience. They are using technologies that allow them access to their data anywhere, anytime, and to work any place they choose.
As mentioned in an earlier post, this makes it impossible for the IT department to assure management that they know where all data is stored, that it is secured properly, and that it is backed up appropriately. It makes it impossible for IT to assist with a lost device or access someone’s OneDrive data when they resign. The answer is straight forward enough. Bring the solution and the administration in-house and under control.
Determine what’s actually required and how the technologies are used. Then, either move everyone to ‘Enterprise’ subscriptions of these services or stand up servers/tools in-house that replicate these technologies. The ‘Enterprise’ offering for these services allow administrators to provision space and preserve data with employee turnover. Also, commercial or open source products can be setup to run in your environment and used to replicate these common services like Dropbox complete with mobile apps. Some of these tools even allow custom branding. Finally, revise corporate policies to address Internet services and technologies.
Once rolled out, your employees will have access to corporate data at their fingertips and administrators will have control that data.
For more information on TCC’s IT Managed Services, please visit our website http://www.e-tcc.com/managed-services.
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