Left unchecked, the number of external people, who have access to your organization’s data, can quickly spiral out of control. This is because employees collaborate and share more and more files with outside resources, but hardly ever think to unshare them again, once the project is done. Setting up a structured – and more importantly automated – approach to unsharing externally shared data is vital.
Problem
There are several challenges here:
- Expiration date on shares is hardly ever set
While setting an expiration date for the share is possible, employees rarely think to do so when sharing a file. Most data shared with people outside your organization simply remains shared indefinitely. - Employees share and forget
Once a project or collaboration with an external party has ended, very few employees think to revisit the files that were shared and unshare them. - IT departments
Leaving it to the IT department to clean up external sharing carries with it at least two problems: They likely don’t have the time for it, and they don’t have the insights into whether the sharing is still needed.
Solution
With Tricent you can easily set up a structured and automated approach to getting rid of sharings that are no longer relevant. Tricent doesn’t delete the files but simply makes sure that they are accessible to outsiders only for as long as necessary.
This process can even involve the employees to keep them informed and use their knowledge of current projects and collaborations to ensure that files are not unshared if they still need to be shared.
