In the last few weeks there has been a number of reports of UK public sector organizations taking advantage of docs.com (Microsoft free document sharing service) as a way to distribute and share documents with in their organizations. However, what many of these organizations didn’t realise was that by default all of the content on this service was shared publicly, and was being indexed by the likes of Google and Bing and appearing in people’s search results.
This was initially discovered by Buzzfeed and some of the content that was inadvertently publicly available was national insurance numbers, bank account details and even passwords. With the impending changes of regulation as a result of GDPR that come into force next year in Europe and the Privacy Amendment Bill 2016 in Australia, it is now more important than ever that businesses take note of ‘shadow IT’ and how the rollout of cloud services may be impacting them.
For users in organizations that have already had Office 365 implemented, Docs.com appears as an extension of the functionality of Office 365. However it is a completely different service. So who can blame an end user for taking advantage of these services if they are not aware of the implications of using these services. IT is often responsible for making sure that the appropriate steps are being taken to educate as well as prevent users from utilising these services whether the services have been officially rolled out or not
These customers depend upon the IT channel to educate them as to the risks associated with these services. Therefore, we should also make sure that when we are enabling them to utilise the likes of Office 365 we are taking a holistic approach to data management through appropriate policies, procedures and technologies in place to manage this.
With the ever-evolving cloud services landscape, we need to be checking in with organizations on a regular basis to understand how they are utilising these services and provide them feedback on how they can mitigate these risks. One such service that we have recently launched to assist our partners with staying relevant in this space, is our Office 365 Reporting Service. This service enables you to provide your clients a monthly health check of their deployment and an avenue to educate them on the ever changing cloud environment.
