How to Communicate File Sharing Risks to Employees

It's one thing for you to understand just how deeply important file sharing safety really is - it's another thing entirely to communicate that importance to your employees. The people who are actually using your file sharing solution can't just care about safety because "their job requires them to." They have to understand just how essential to the longevity of your clients, your company and ultimately themselves they really are. If you want to effectively communicate file sharing risks to your employees, there are a number of important things to keep in mind.

3 Tips for Effectively Communicating File Sharing Risks

Training Sessions

One of the most effective ways to communicate file sharing risks to your employees is through specially designed training sessions that, when coupled with quizzes, will help guarantee that your team understands at the bare minimum the basics of file sharing safety. This can not only help educate them on the best and safest ways to use your own in-house solution, but it can also instill in them valuable skills they can use on their own cloud-based private storage services, too.

Bring the Consequences Into Reality

Another great way to communicate file sharing risks to your employees involves taking the consequences and bringing them into a reality in terms they can understand. Remember that just because employees are well-versed in technology doesn't necessarily mean they have a full understanding of how things like “the cloud” really work.

Metaphors can be helpful in this regard. Your employees wouldn't leave their opened credit card statements out in their mailbox for everyone to see, yet this is essentially exactly what they're doing by thinking of something like cloud storage the same way they do a secure file sharing option. Instead, they would want to lock that statement up in a safe where it belongs - which is what they do when they employ a solution like SFTP.

Make Them Aware of the Physical Dangers, Too

One concept that many employees might not grasp is the idea that insecure file sharing solutions also leave files vulnerable if a physical device is stolen, too. Once a file has been downloaded to a device via something like a cloud-based solution, it can be stolen right along with a laptop, mobile phone, tablet or other piece of equipment.

Again, use real-world examples of the dangers of these types of situations. In 2012, for example, a laptop computer and a series of unencrypted backup tapes were stolen out of a healthcare professional's car, potentially exposing the personal medical records of hundreds of people to malicious individuals. This is just one small example of the very real danger that is being needlessly created by using an insecure file sharing option like a public cloud-based provider.