Your proprietary company knowledge is the most valuable asset your organization has.
You need to make sure that it’s securely protected at all times so that your competitors aren’t able to profit off your intellectual property. That means your CIO or CTO may be cautious about approving tools that allow your team members to share confidential information online in a cloud-based environment.
However, in light of recent CDC-mandated restrictions on employees working in collaborative work environments, it’s becoming increasingly essential to provide remote workers with a secure online collaboration toolkit, where they can discuss and search for detailed company information.
Employees and managers aren’t always confident about how secure their knowledge management solution is. A 2018 Ponemon Institute study found that 44% of respondents use file sharing and content collaboration tools to share internal content. However, only 39% of respondents said that they were confident about their company’s ability to keep proprietary data secure.
So what’s needed in a secure knowledge management solution?
Secure knowledge management systems can be described in terms of the three Cs: communication, collaboration, and content.
The platform should provide intuitive communication tools. Team members should be able to ask questions, provide responses, vote for the most helpful answers, and search for keywords or tags.
In terms of collaboration, the solution should be adopted by multiple functions at every level of your organization, and employees should be encouraged to cross-pollinate their ideas and insights across departments. The tool should also be integrated with other communication tools that your team regularly uses, such as Slack or other chat tools.
The content on the solution can consist of any proprietary knowledge that might be valuable to other team members. Instead of keeping industry knowledge siloed within a single team or department, it can be securely shared on the knowledge management platform in a Q&A format. HR policies, technical specifications, legacy code, and other essential content can all be stored here, with updates to each thread based on new information on the subject.
To maintain the security of your knowledge sharing solution, you should use a single sign on (SSO) authentication system, which will ensure that only allowed IP addresses are allowed to access the tool without providing additional authentication. Your data should be encrypted and your instance of the solution should be isolated from the company’s public cloud solution on a separate network with strict firewall rules. By using an enterprise-grade knowledge sharing solution, you can provide your team with the tools to collaborate and innovate while keeping your precious knowledge secure from the outside world.
