Published: January 18, 2019
Plenty of folks are making staying more organized a top New Year’s resolution for 2019. According to Forbes, it’s a good one too, as they named ‘organization’ one of the top ten best New Year’s resolutions for your career. Everyone could benefit from some added structure and organization in their lives. From making your bed every day and keeping your room tidy, to understanding where and how you’re spending your time, organization is the key to staying productive and energized throughout the day.
With the New Year, many businesses are looking to implement new initiatives to clean up operations and bureaucratic red tape to help the office stay organized and run more efficiently. One smart strategy companies are employing to help with insight into efficiency is file activity monitoring (FAM).
Because of the large number of files that any given business has on hand, whether it is content images and copy, logo formats, or any other marketing related files, it can be challenging to keep track of who has access to all of them and to ensure that they are getting used appropriately. That’s where file activity monitoring comes in.
File activity monitoring products are specifically designed to ensure that those accessing your company’s files are legitimate employees or clients and that when there is unusual activity, you will be notified through a security alert. Think of FAM as a loyal watchdog. A FAM product will watch whoever enters your company’s folders and accesses files, and they won’t receive a warning as long as they are a trusted employee. However, when a stranger or someone without proper identification tries to enter, FAM will bark and bark until someone sees what is going on and puts a stop to it (please note that a FAM product will not actually bark, unfortunately).
Imagine if every time someone wanted to access an important file or other sensitive information, they needed to reach out to someone in the company to attain a password. You would find consistent roadblocks to productivity whenever passwords were lost or forgotten, or if those who know the passwords were busy in a meeting or out of the office that day.
Not only do you waste time retrieving a password, but passwords can easily be stolen or seen by the wrong people. You already know that FAM alerts you when there is abnormal activity, such as someone attempting to hack into your files, but it will also block suspicious users or connections that try and look at your information.
If your business deals with highly personal information, FAM can discover and monitor access to your sensitive documents stored on many file systems. It will aggregate data, give you a view into the activity, alert you in case of suspicious access, and allow you to block access to select files and folders and from select users.
Along with this, FAM solutions can audit accessed files in the event of a data leak or hack, which will make it easier to figure out what happened and who may be responsible.
While MediaBeacon is not a File Activity Monitoring tool, it does help you understand how your digital asset files are being used and distributed across your organization. As a digital asset management (DAM) solution, MediaBeacon stores assets like pictures and videos with information attached to them. This makes the assets searchable so your sales and marketing teams can self-service images for promotional materials. Since the materials are stored in the DAM, you can see who is downloading the assets and which assets are being used the most. To learn more about how MediaBeacon can help save you time and reduce legal risk associated with digital assets, contact us.
