Securing Collaboration

The collaboration tools described in this chapter do indeed facilitate collaboration: They help groups improve the quality of their work, while reducing travel and other logistical expenses, and they can enable people to participate in meetings asynchronously.

However, they also pose security risks- possibly serious ones. Consider Google Docs. All documents are stored on Google servers, which are located, well, who knows where. Does Google protect those computers appropriately? If those computers are located in, say, San Francisco, will they survive an earthquake?

Google is a responsible, rich, and knowledgeable company that understands the need for disaster preparedness. But, as outsiders, we do not know how they protect their sites. Natural disasters are not the only threat; computer crime, the actions of disgruntled employees, and computer viruses (computer programs that replicate themselves) must be considered as well.

But, chances are-even that phrase is revealing, do you really want to gamble with your data?-Google knows what it is doing, and your data is more than reasonably protected. However, how does the data get to a Google site? As you will learn in Chapter 6, most wireless traffic, including Google Docs, is unprotected from wireless snoopers. Are you processing that data at a local coffee shop?

Do you care that anyone in that shop can copy your data? But, more likely, you pose a greater risk to data security than either Google, Microsoft, or a snooper. To see why, suppose you are the manager of a product line and you observe an odd pattern in sales for your products.

That pattern might be related to differences in advertising among geographic regions, or it might have something to do with changes in consumer purchasing behavior. You decide to have a Webinar with some of your staff, employees of your advertising agency, and a marketing guru who specializes in contemporary consumer behavior. To prepare for the meeting, you access your corporate computer systems and obtain all of the sales for your products over the past 12 months. That data is highly confidential and is protected by your IS department in many ways. You can access it only because you have access authority as an employee.

But, without thinking about security, you post that data in a Windows Live SkyDrive folder and share it with your employees, your advertising agency, and the marketing guru. You have just violated corporate security. That confidential data is now available to the agency and the consultant. Either party can download it, and you have no way of knowing that the download was made or what was done with it. Suppose the marketing guru makes a copy and uses it to improve her knowledge of consumer behavior. Unknown to you, she also consults for your chief rival. She has used your data to improve her knowledge and is now using that knowledge to benefit your competitor.

(This sets aside the even uglier possibility that she gives or sells your data to that competitor.) SharePoint has extensive security features, and as long as the administrator of your SharePoint site has implemented a proper security plan it should be well protected. But, of course, SharePoint makes it easy to download data, and if you share that data with others via Google Docs or SkyDrive . . . well, you get the picture. Collaboration tools have many benefits, but they do open the door to loss of critical assets. Let the collaborator beware!

Discussion Questions

1. Any email or instant message that you send over a wireless device is open. Anyone with some free software and a bit of knowledge can snoop on your communications. In class, your professor could read all of your email and instant messages, as could anyone else in the class. Does this knowledge change your behavior in class? Why or why not?

2. Unless you are so foolish as to reveal personal data, such as credit card numbers, Social Security number, or a driver's license number in an email or instant message, the loss of privacy to you as an individual is small. Someone might learn that you were gossiping about someone else and it might be embarrassing, but that loss is not critical. How does that situation change for business communications? Describe losses, other than those in this Guide, that could occur when using email or Google Docs or Windows Live SkyDrive.

3. In addition to Google Docs, Google offers Gmail, a free email service with an easy-to-use interface and that famous Google search capability. Using Gmail, searching through past emails is easy, fast, and accurate. In addition, because mail is stored on Google computers, it is easy to access one's email, contacts, and other data from any computer at any location. Many employees prefer using Gmail to their corporate email system. What are the consequences to the organization of some employees doing most of their email via Gmail? What are the risks?

4. Summarize the risks of using SkyDrive in a business setting. How can organizations protect themselves from such risks? Is there any new risk here? After all, organizations have been sharing data in other formats with their business partners for years. Is this much ado about nothing? Why or why not?

5. Do you think the risks of using Google Docs or SkyDrive can be so large that it makes sense for organizations to disallow its use? Why or why not? What are the costs of disallowing such use? How could an organization prevent an employee from uploading data using a corporate computer at work and then accessing that data from browsers on iPads or iPhones?