The Challenge
The natural gas exploration and production industry relies heavily upon emails and large attachments that address a wide variety of commercially-sensitive issues, including surveys, projected productions, financials, legal responsibilities and implications, etc. As with all major organizations, the company was increasingly concerned about data leakage from emails. With huge quantities of current and legacy emails residing on desktops, management was aware of the issues that could arise if commercially-sensitive email content was accidently released to non-authorized recipients.
The company was also in the process of enhancing its SharePoint implementation and had plans to encourage the use of the collaboration and information sharing facilities, both internally and to a select group of partner organizations via Intranet and Extranets. Although SharePoint provided powerful and comprehensive information access controls, the company was concerned that it would have no effective control once information had been retrieved from the SharePoint managed data repository.
“This was a classic example of potential data leakage and the need to address the situation before it could escalate into a serious corporate issue,” explained Fortra's Sales Account Manager, James Everard. “Already, the situation had been identified as a cause for concern, but with board-level strategic initiatives which included enhanced collaboration and information sharing, as well as long-term plans to archive historic data, the issues of managing information and ensuring that its handling and release conformed to strict regulations, processes and procedures, was becoming critical.”
Aware that there are a number of tools developed for information classification which would help to achieve the business’ security objectives, the company analyzed several alternative technologies before identifying Fortra Data Classification as the preferred supplier due to their strong portfolio of classification products. “The company was looking for solutions that would deliver secure, easy-to-implement and simplified management controls over email and data labelling and release,” continued James Everard. “Low overheads were a major requirement, as was the ability of the final solution to integrate seamlessly with the installed Symantec email security family of products.
The company also wanted to partner with an organization with a strong UK presence to provide a support service that matched their working hours.”
The Solution
Following in-depth testing, live demonstrations and discussions with senior corporate stakeholders, the company decided to implement the entire portfolio of the Fortra's Classifier Suite products, including, Email Classifier, OWA Classifier, and SharePoint Classifier across the entire organization, citing the capabilities and features delivered by the solutions, Fortra's Classifier Suite’ understanding of the issues and objectives, and the professionalism of its technical consultants.
Conclusion
The Classifier products have radically improved the way in which email, documents and SharePoint-sourced information are managed and controlled. The solutions have increased staff awareness of the sensitivity of information being handled within the organization as well as providing evidence that the company’s applicable regulations have been met and has boosted the company’s ROI in DLP, encryption, archiving & storage, e-discovery, information rights management and ERDMS.