The Evangelist

This post was originally posted in the Workshare blog as The Security Evangelist.

Workshare Security Series

This is my first blog post in a new series on "security". I'll be discussing various aspects of security - how it affects you and how the team at Workshare handles the challenges around it through our products and operations.

The goal of the series is to help you understand how to better protect yourself and your clients, and to raise awareness of common issues and approaches to help resolve them. I'll also look into any relevant security events that may happen.

What is security?

To begin then - and this might sound a strange question - what is security?

This is a question that’s commonly asked and for which there are many different answers. When it comes to security on computer systems, we are talking about Information Security.

Information Security is based on the principle that data, whether customer, personal or business-related, needs to be stored and managed in a safe way. The industry-standard approach is built around three main concepts:

1. Confidentiality

Making sure that only authorized users have access to data.

2. Integrity

Ensuring data does not get corrupted, and keeping track of all modifications, including information about who modified what and when. In an ideal world, you will be able to go back to an exact point in time to identify this.

3. Availability

Having the most secure data store is of no use if the data is not there when you need it, so great care has to be taken to make sure the data is always available.

On top of information security requirements, there are also legal and compliance requirements that have to be considered as part of security.

So, now we’ve defined it, why do we need to worry about it?

From a personal point of view, you want to protect your privacy and make sure nobody can use your data for nefarious purposes, be it identity theft, fraud or any other crime.

As a business, you want to protect assets, both tangible and intangible, including business and customer-specific ones. Not only is it in the best interests of your firm to protect your client data, you will no doubt have contractual agreements and legal requirements to make sure you’re providing adequate security.

At Workshare, we’re constantly working to enable collaboration on files, while keeping data protected. Whether you’re an individual or a business, we help protect and manage data, while integrating that into normal document workflows of daily life.

In later posts, I’ll look further into how you can best achieve security and reduce risk to yourself and your business.