Just like fish, you shouldn’t leave your files out for too long

Category: FMCG - fish and seafood supplier
Size: 300+ employees

Nordward is a high-quality fish & seafood supplier that provides traceability for their products in order to help restaurants pick sustainable options. The company shares price and product lists, as well as personnel data for scheduling shifts, and those are sensitive for different reasons, such as GDPR fines.

According to Christian Ahlin, CIO & Group Head of IT, when it comes to keeping track of their shared files, they take the same responsible approach as they do with fish. That's what made them recognize several file-sharing concerns.

Challenges

1. Security by design

Google Workspace (as well as Microsoft 365) is built to promote collaboration. They have made sharing as easy and convenient as possible. However, this also means that reviewing and removing collaborators’ access to the files isn’t their main focus. For Nordward, it was absolutely a must to know what files are shared outside their domain. That's why they needed a secure solution that allowed for collaboration but also easily helped them protect their shared files.

“Google Workspace is currently lacking the responsible sharing aspect of controlling access and longevity. And that creates this difficult compliance work about setting the time to go through a lot of access rights, which is a very important task.”

2. Data governance & traceability

“We don’t want to have a legacy trail of old data being accessed by parties we aren’t aware of.”

Data governance is necessary to meet compliance requirements, optimize work processes, and minimize human errors, and Nordward wanted to make sure that all of their data was in the right place and available to the right people. Instead of being reactive to mishappenings (which is quite expensive and time consuming), Nordward wanted to have proactive measures in place.

“It’s much cheaper and less labor intensive than doing it reactively when things have gone bad. This is the same reason why we work with contingency fallback plans. We do that ahead of schedule. We don’t like to put out fires, we need to work proactively.”

3. Human errors

“What we want to avoid is human errors - files being sent to the wrong person. The good thing about sharing is that you can make a mistake and then you can unshare. When you send a file [as an email attachment], it’s permanently gone. So we have a bit more tolerance for human errors with file-sharing in general,” says Christian.

Human error is the most common cause for data-related incidents and happens to be quite dangerous if caught too late. Sharing a file with the wrong person and realizing the mistake shortly generally isn’t the end of the world. However, not realizing the mistake might be. Christian believes there should be space for mistakes, but there should also be preventive measures in place to minimize the risk of data exposure.

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Solution

Klarna Bank mentioned in an online group that they had implemented Tricent to manage their data and file sharings, highly recommending the solution. That alone convinced Christian to try it at Nordward.

Tricent helps Nordward with managing their shared files in a responsible and compliant way. 

• The tool removes external access to files after a certain period since they’ve been shared. This prevents incidents like sharing a file with the wrong person from becoming a threat;
• With Tricent, Nordward gets to review all their shared files and choose for how long they want to grant access to external collaborators;
• No old files are ever left unattended;
• Nordward has a complete overview of their shared files.

“Tricent is more about cleaning up so we don’t have a legacy trail of data. Now with Tricent, we allow our employees to share and after a certain period, we unshare it, so that we don’t have a legacy trail of old data being accessed by parties we aren’t aware of.”

Results

Nordward strives to do things responsibly and sustainably throughout their entire supply chain. From the way they fish to the way they educate their customers, manage their operations, and share their data, the company has invested time and effort to promote and maintain sustainability however they can. 

“We take responsibility for fish and we take responsibility for our files. Tricent doesn’t help us with being more environmentally friendly (sharing files vs. emailing them), that’s Google Workspace, but Tricent helps us manage data responsibly by having control over it.”

So far, Nordward has successfully unshared 3.870 files with Tricent.

For Nordward, Tricent became a sustainable tool that automates processes and makes work more efficient. It ended up saving the company time and money that will now be used to improve other business areas, and it offered them security by design when it comes to sharing files. All these things contributed to a proactive approach to data security and therefore, Nordward was able to reach a new level of sustainability - this time within file-sharing management.