On October 22nd, COCo hosted an Ateliers/C called “Reflections on cybersecurity issues in your organization”. In this workshop, we discussed the cybersecurity process that we recently completed at COCo. We also shared some best practices to mitigate common security risks that can result from human errors. Some of those best practices were about the use of cloud-based document storage, which will share with you here!

Table of Contents

Access to Documents on the Cloud

A lot of organizations use cloud based services like Google Workspace to store their documents. The cloud offers a lot of benefits in terms of being able to work and collaborate remotely. Community groups also face challenges with ensuring the data that is stored there is secure. Underlying many of these challenges is a lack of clear processes around managing who has access to what files.

Create Shared Folders

Our main suggestion for managing your documents in the cloud is to create a system of shared folders that are owned by your organization. Shared folders allow you to keep the owner of key documents as you, the organization, and have more control over what kind of access users should have. It will also ensure that the documents stay accessible and easy to find even after the original creator leaves the organization.

For example, you could have a “Finances” folder that is shared with team members who have finance related tasks. Your Finance Coordinator could have managing access to this folder, and give viewing access to other members, so that they can access information without necessarily editing the files. When the finance coordinator leaves, no files are lost, and it is easy to change the access. For shared files to be effective, you need to avoid storing files in your personal cloud folder or locally on your computer and prioritize the appropriate shared folder. This will help you avoid having duplicates of the same document and losing track of which version is the most up to date.

Organize File Access by Groups

We also recommend that you organize access to documents on the cloud by groups, rather than by individuals. Organizing access through groups makes it easier to provide access to shared resources to new team members, and to revoke access when someone leaves. For example, you might create a Google or Office 365 Group for the finance team. This allows you to share access to the Finance folder that you created earlier with all members of this group without having to add individual email addresses. When someone leaves, you remove them from the group, and so does their access to your finance documents.

Send Links, Not Attachments

When sending a file, send a link instead of an attachment.This way, even if the email itself gets intercepted (or simply sent to the wrong address), attackers won’t have access to the data being shared because they would need to log into your cloud ecosystem to access it. Being able to do this is a benefit of using the cloud, so make use of it!

Remove Access & Check Access

Here are our other suggestions for improving your practices around this:

Avoid unauthorized or unintended access to files and folders. For any file or folder that you manage, regularly check who has access to it and why. If you notice that someone no longer needs access to it, remove them.
When someone leaves the organization, make sure that their access is removed from the cloud by closing their account or revoking the account’s access to your infrastructure. If someone changes roles within the organization, you should review their cloud access and make sure it is still appropriate for their new role. If you have used the group structure mentioned previously, this will be as simple as removing their user from the group. Otherwise you will need to remove them from each folder or file that they were added to one by one. We suggest organizations have an “offboarding” checklist that includes the key things to make sure you do when a team member leaves, including this.

Other Resources about the Cloud

We have included some resources below about the two most common document storage we see being used by community groups – Google Workspace and Office 365.