Every company’s human resources department exists to protect the company’s best interests, and part of that duty involves maintaining a secure environment for digital files. To achieve this, most organizations use secure content management platforms like Box because it’s not cost-effective to create custom solutions.

For instance, Box comes with integrated security controls to keep companies compliant with regulatory mandates and data retention policies. To create this level of compliance from scratch would be costly.
 
Why is secure content management an HR issue?
 
If you’re wondering how and why secure content management is an HR issue, it’s because of the potential damage to your organization from not securing access to company files.

For example, if you give all of your employees access to company files stored on a generic website through a single login, your company is extremely vulnerable.
 
Employee sabotage is a big risk
 
When you only have one login credential, each time an employee leaves the company, someone will have to change the password and update everyone with the new password. This is time-consuming and most managers won’t follow through with this. Unfortunately, this will leave your company wide open to sabotage from disgruntled employees.
 
Employee sabotage is a possibility and it’s actually quite common. If someone from your company decides to sabotage your files, your company could experience extensive damage. For example, a woman working remotely for a credit union in New York was fired in June 2021. Two days after she was fired, she accessed the company’s server and deleted 21.3 GB of data, including mortgage loan applications and the company’s ransomware protection software.
 
Naturally, this created a PR nightmare for the company and they had to spend thousands of dollars to restore the data. Unfortunately, the company’s credibility with clients was irreversibly damaged.
 
Secure content management helps HR coordinate with IT
 
In a perfect world, HR would coordinate with IT anytime there’s a dismissal. For instance, HR would talk to the IT department to coordinate revoking access to accounts while the employee is in their exit interview.
 
When you know all of your files are in one location, it won’t be hard for IT to revoke access. However, if the employee has too many points of access that aren’t documented, like with remote employees, your IT team is sure to miss some of those accounts. This is where content management becomes an HR problem.
 
The solution is to create a company policy that outlines both preventive measures and solutions for HR and IT to work together when someone is being terminated. There’s just no other way to maintain full security over your company’s files.
 
Secure content management reduces the effort required to process a dismissal
 
The fewer security steps your company has to go through during someone’s dismissal, the better. When you don’t have a secure content management system in place, everything has to be done manually and from memory.

For instance, you might need to have IT manually disable several different data storage accounts while you bring the employee in for their exit interview.
 
Or, if your organization only uses one shared login for all of your company accounts, it could take a full day to change all of your passwords. You might not even get it done in a day. During this process, if you don’t get to every account fast enough, and if any account is forgotten, it could become a major problem.
 
Even if your former employee doesn’t use their login credentials to sabotage the company, someone else might if they come across the username and password after hacking your former employee. A whopping 81% of hacking-related data breaches are caused by stolen passwords.
 
When you use a secure content management system, you’ll have separate logins for each employee. When you need to terminate someone, all you’ll need to do is login and disable their individual account.

A secure, organized content management system also works to eliminate the need for multiple accounts. You’ll get all the features you need in one spot so you won’t need to host files with multiple providers.
 
Data security is always an HR issue
 
Anything that has the potential to make your organization look bad is an HR issue, and nothing can cause harm like data security incidents. Between data breaches, ransomware attacks, and insider attacks from current or former employees, you have a lot to be concerned with regarding IT.
 
Ultimately, the more you can secure your files, the better. You won’t be able to prevent every potentially attack, but you will be able to foil some of the most predictable and careless security incidents.

Securing data is one of the most effective methods to protect your organization’s reputation and client/customer trust.