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Secure Search Can Protect Your Sensitive Information

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Two guys walk into an office.  The first one asks, “Do you know what’s different between searching the Internet and searching your intranet?”  The second one exclaims “Just about everything!”  Sometimes it can seem like everything that you know about searching on the Internet just doesn’t apply to your intranet.  You expect when you search the Internet you’ll find something.  (It may not be the right thing but that’s not relevant right now.)

eDiscovery activities can leverage search to dig up more dirt than a Caterpillar convention.  Do you want to know the best data discovery tool that auditors have right now?  It’s your search engine.  You’ve already indexed the content.  All they need is an account and they can find any piece of information that you didn’t want found by just anyone in the organization.  Maybe they’re searching for credit card numbers for a PCI audit, or social security numbers for a PII audit, whatever it is the search tools are going to find it.  And yet, when you want to find something you’re left out in the cold.

Security management is a challenge at every organization.  With every user able to allow other users to see content there are bound to be mistakes.  That’s where you can apply your know how, savvy, and SharePoint techniques to create solutions to help you fight bad security – or bad data practices that can leave you in hot water.

SharePoint search allows you to create search alerts (if enabled).  Search alerts allow you to preconfigure search queries and have the new results that match those queries delivered to you in the form of an email.  These emails then make ready-made lists for documents you should check on each day.  Alternatively, you can use RSS to capture a feed of the items that match the search and have those conveniently archived inside of Microsoft Outlook in a folder for you.  Either way, you’re leveraging search to reach out and let you know when there’s potentially sensitive data being left unsecured.

Of course, you can do the standard searches with your account for things like social security numbers, but in other cases you’ll want to make sure the information isn’t ever stored on the system – like credit card numbers.  For those cases, a special “read all” account can be configured to send alerts to the appropriate parties.

It may be scary to turn on search across all of the repositories in your organization, but security through obscurity isn’t the best policy.  By enabling search you can leverage it to find the problem bits of data lying around your organization – before it gets discovered by the wrong person.

 


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