In meeting the external file sharing, secure email and content collaboration needs of our clients, eShare has always sought to leverage applications, storage and work flows our clients already have in place. The goal being to increase productivity and drive down IT costs wherever possible.
This extends to the reporting and analytics our clients require to understand what information is being shared with outside parties and how this information is being used. This visibility into how and with whom external collaboration happens allows our clients to keep their information secure and their teams on track.
Though many of our clients output eShare event logs to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products like Splunk, they are always looking to better collect, analyze and act upon the untapped value of the data eShare generates, giving them the insights to improve the productivity and security of their external collaborations. With the accelerating adoption of Office 365, Microsoft Power BI is increasingly the platform of choice to provide these insights.
eShare has fully embraced Power BI by creating dashboards and drill down reports that present a variety of views into the e-Share audit data. These reports are hosted in eShare’s Power BI workspace, running in Microsoft Azure, and published for secure access by our clients using their Power BI license. We can optionally output the eShare audit data to the cloud file storage of our client’s choosing (e.g. SharePoint Online), from where they can create their own Power BI reports, using our standard report as a starting point for their work.
In the report example above we see a high-level view of the external file sharing an organization called Bank2Trust has done. 910 files have been shared by 50 users, with those files being shared from a combination of OneDrive and SharePoint and this sharing increasing over time. A spike in activity occurs on August 4th that invites a closer look. By selecting that peak in the timeline (see the image below), the graphs are now scoped to that day alone, where I can see that the majority of that activity is attributed to file sharing done by Nikos and that these activities are mostly file updates, which are in most all cases innocuous. Note the many filters available to further drill down into the considerable detail that eShare logs related to Trusted Share creation and usage.
The two reports shown above provide an overview, but often times a much more detailed view into Trusted Sharing is needed. For this we provide a much more detailed report, which additionally includes the recipients of Trusted Shares, the specific files that were shared, the rights granted to the recipients, and the actions taken on these shared files by the recipients (see the image below).
It may be interesting to look at specific user, data and action combinations to identify external sharing that is worrisome from a data protection standpoint. In the report below we've scoped the report to download events only. We see that the majority of recipient downloads are being performed by the recipient organization "eShare" from Trusted Shares created by Alice. If Alice is a supply chain manager and eShare a known supplier with an NDA, this activity is not concerning.
If I were to be curious about the specific files involved and when the downloads occurred, scrolling down in this report yields further details (see image below). As with all of the reports, powerful filters are available to home in on the activity of specific interest.
Trusted Share reporting and analytics via Power BI provides the visibility into how and with whom external collaboration happens so that you can keep your information secure and your collaborations on track.
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