Remote Working: Protecting sensitive data

Online collaboration has its challenges, particularly when working with sensitive data. But, writes Tabella Managing Director Lewis Holden, there are a range of tools that deliver security without getting in the way of teamwork.

The recent lockdowns have again seen a surge in the use of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration tools as more people work from home. Securing remote workers remains a challenge though, and even without the lockdown protecting your sensitive data is becoming ever more important.

As archTIS’ New Zealand partner, Tabella brings to market leading security solutions in the sensitive data space, including securing Microsoft Teams with NC Protect.

Converting a channel from standard to private

NC Protect takes a different approach to creating Private channels in Teams that allows users to make changes later. Leveraging the same logic engine and UI augmentation from the previous scenarios Team Owners can restrict access to a channel to a subset of Team Members. Importantly, the NC Protect functionality can be altered or completely removed to make the channel open to Team Members.

Facilitates fully featured private channels

NC Protect provided Private channels maintain all the capabilities of a standard channel. Thanks to the way that NC Protect enables Private Channel access there is no need to create the underlying disconnect between the main Team and the Private channel that the out of the box feature requires therefore scheduling meetings in our Private channels and adding the Planner app is possible.

Advanced chat blocking and information barriers

NC Protect can block chat messages in real-time that contain sensitive information, personal information (PII, PHI), payment data, inappropriate content or language, and apply information barriers in Teams to enforce policies for information security and regulatory compliance in chats.

Additionally, if new rules are added to block chat data, any existing conversations with data matching the new rule will retroactively remove the data to ensure the entire chat history is appropriately secured. Other solutions, including OOTB tools, only lock existing chat messages as read-only and block any subsequent messages.

Provide single channel access

Adding the specified Guest or Member user attributes to the conditional logic to only allow access to a specific channel. This eliminates the need to create a new Team for the sole purpose of sharing an existing channels content with a guest or other member.

IT friendly private channels

IT Friendly Private Channels provide the ability to simplify the creation and management of private channels that restrict access to specific individuals within a Team. NC Protect restricts private channel access based on user attributes without increasing the number of site collections in SPO to support those channels. It reduces admin overhead over time associated with managing large numbers of site collections and simplifies backup and life cycle task

‘Archiving’ channels and removing tabs and apps

NC Protect can augment the Teams app UI to remove various components. We achieve this using conditional logic to support the use case. For example, in the pseudo “Archiving” of a channel we create a rule that only allows Team Owners or designated Team Members to have that channel available to them in the Teams app. The same principles can be used to automatically remove apps and tabs such as the Wiki for some or all the Team.

Third party sharing

NC Protect eliminates the need to create separate Teams for guests to control access to specific types of content. Instead, NC Protect automatically controls what content guests can see in a Team based on their user attributes, making guest access simpler to manage and more secure. For example, content that is marked “internal use only” can be hidden from guest users in the Team so they only see files they are permitted access to within the Team.

Learn more

Contact Tabella today to learn more about NC Protect for Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, Office 365, file shares and even DropBox!

Tabella is a New Zealand technology company focused on bringing worldleading cybersecurity solutions to the New Zealand market. It is the New Zealand partner for archTIS, the market leader in attribute-based access control (ABAC) cybersecurity solutions.