Five Steps for Making Box Your Standard

As BoxWorks draws to a close, it is clear that cloud-based collaboration is moving from a novel experiment in a workgroup to mainstream across the enterprise. CIOs that are ahead of the trend are standardizing on corporate favorites like Box.

But there is a great divide between making a choice on behalf of the company and driving behavior across its entire user base. Here are five best practices – crowd-sourced from joint Box-Netskope customers – for making Box the enterprise choice not just in theory, but in reality:

1. Consolidate on and coach users to Box. Find unsanctioned cloud apps that provide similar functionality to Box, or redundant corporate instances of Box, and create an automated workflow to send coaching messages to users guiding them to your corporate instance.
Make that workflow flexible by allowing users to report a false positive or enter a business justification (for example, if they are collaborating with a partner in the partner’s app). By creating transparency and enabling users to provide feedback, your program will have a much higher chance of success.
2. Differentiate between “corporate” Box and personal instances. If you are standardizing on Box, find and consolidate the corporate instances of Box while allowing users to continue accessing personal instances. Roll up work-related usage onto your corporate instance so you can more easily monitor activity, enforce policy, and enhance collaboration. Consider different policies for each, such as “Secure confidential business content in ‘corporate’ Box” versus “Don’t allow upload of confidential business content to ‘personal’ Box instances.”
3. Govern admin and user access to Box. Right-size your administrative privileges to ensure a “least privilege” model in Box. Furthermore, enforce secure access policies in Box based on the who, what, when, and where of the situation. For example, offer full access to users on corporate devices or in certain user groups or locations, while limiting access to others. You can accomplish this with a combination of a single sign-on solution to provision, deprovision, and secure access (while making users’ lives easier!) and a Cloud Access Security Broker.
4. Enforce activity- and data-level policies in Box and across the Box ecosystem. Enforce policies granularly based on user or group, device, geography, activity, content, and more. For example, if you want to prevent “insiders” from sharing content outside of the company, enforce a “Don’t share outside of the company” policy for that group. And if you want people only to upload content to Box but not to other Cloud Storage and Collaboration apps, set a category-wide policy preventing upload, except to Box. Remember to extend usage policies you set in Box to ecosystem apps that may share data with the platform, such as e-signing, content management, and project management workflows.
5. Detect and manage security threats in Box and its ecosystem. Detect behavior that could signal security threats,
data leakage, or even the presence of malware in Box and its ecosystem apps.
Prioritize behavior anomalies from highest to lowest risk.
Focus on activity- based anomalies such as excessive downloading or sharing, users logging in from multiple locations or devices, and failed logins. Pull in data such as user accounts that have been compromised in data breaches unrelated to your business (your users re-use passwords!). View activity trails surrounding anomalies in context (e.g., user, group, device, location, app, content) to understand how the anomaly happened, determine remediation, and report on it for security and compliance. Use this information to enhance your policy-setting in Box and the ecosystem.

These five practices – the best ideas from our joint customers with Box – have helped organizations go from choosing to truly standardizing on Box. For more detail on these practices, check out our latest e-book, Safely Enabling Box, which contains a detailed checklist on the above.

Have we missed anything? Share your standardization practices on Box and your other corporate sanctioned cloud apps.