Enterprises continue to leak data either through carelessness or falling victim to hackers who have become increasingly sophisticated and effective. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that will protect an organization’s data. Rather, organizations have to set up many barriers to thwart the many different ways their most sensitive data can be compromised.
Accellion’s secure content platform, kiteworks, boasts a number of capabilities that enable enterprise employees to access, edit and share data securely. Recently, we announced several new security features that we’re particularly excited about. These, combined with the many existing security features already within kiteworks, serve to further mitigate the risk of a data breach. Here's a breif overview.
Desktop Remote Wipe
Remote wipe is a great feature that allows IT administrators to remotely delete sensitive data from stolen or lost devices. Typically, file-sharing and content management platforms have only had the capability to remote wipe data stored on smartphones and tablets.
With this latest release of kiteworks, we’re making remote wipe available for laptops and desktop systems, as well. This capability is an industry first and an important addition to enterprise security against data breaches and other forms of data loss.
Restricted Folders and Leak-proof Editing
Another first for file sharing and content management platforms: restricted folders and leak-proof editing. Restricted folders allow authorized users to read and edit content, but not to download or forward it. Leak-proof editing means that while editing content, users can’t save files or duplicate content to new, unauthorized locations. kiteworks enforces these security measures across all devices and locations.
Why are these features so important? Sometimes users don’t realize that they shouldn’t save files to a local, unprotected location or share confidential content with people outside the organization. Other times, they might forward confidential content accidentally (e.g., not realizing external users are on a cc: list), even though they know that unauthorized distribution is prohibited.
Restricted folders and leak-proof editing prevent these types of unauthorized data leaks but also ensure that authorized users can work on the content needed for doing their jobs, anywhere, on any device. It’s a win/win for IT security and employee productivity.
Secure Email Messages
We’re also introducing a new secure email feature that enables users in kiteworks or Microsoft Outlook to secure the body of their email messages. Attachments are still encrypted, as they were in earlier releases of kiteworks, but now the email body itself is secured by requiring email recipients to click a link and authenticate themselves before reading an email’s text. This adds another important layer of protection to enterprise employees and the sensitive content they handle.
Other New Security Features
There are several other security features we recently announced in addition to the above. These include:
- Collaboration Permissions for User Profiles
Enable or disable user permissions to ensure that users in specific roles do not accidentally share confidential information outside the enterprise. - File Type Exclusions
To reduce the risk of malware infection, administrators can prevent the uploading into kiteworks of file types that are popular with malware authors like .exe, .mov, and .mp4. And kiteworks does more than simply check the file extension; it also evaluates the MIME type of the file itself to prevent users from renaming a file with a different file extension. - Sign-On Using Kerberos
kiteworks extends its support for single sign-on technology with support for Kerberos, a popular, industry-standard network authentication protocol. - Touch ID
kiteworks now allows iOS users on Touch ID devices (iPhone 5S or later) to authenticate themselves using their device’s built-in fingerprint reader. - Multi-Branding
Another first for the industry: kiteworks enables large enterprises to brand their kiteworks solution not just at the company level, but down to the subsidiary level. Multi-branding ensures a consistent user experiences and reduces concerns about phishing.
These new features complement a long and substantial list of security features that are already available in the kiteworks platform—features such as encryption of all content in motion, in use and at rest; customer ownership of encryption keys; complete audit trails of user actions; integration with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems; support for eDiscovery; support for data sovereignty; app whitelisting, and much more. (For a complete overview of kiteworks' extensive security features, read our kiteworks Security White Paper.)
To learn more about how kiteworks can help your organization communicate and collaborate more easily and securely, please contact us.