While I’m sure that any person who has transitioned from office to remote work can provide an endless list of the pros and cons of each, this blog is focussing on the tools and technology required for businesses to keep up with the new-work-order.

With organisations dispersed around the globe, the need for cloud-based collaboration has never been so crucial. But for many industries, the ability to collaborate on tasks and simplify workflows isn’t enough; they need to enable remote employees to securely collaborate in real-time – reducing unnecessary meetings, back and forth email threads, and vague document titles like “Mark Revised Final 2.0”, all with the confidence that their data and documents are protected.

Here are 5 ways your business can benefit from Secure Collaboration:

1. Security & Tracking

Many of the leading collaboration tools are not suitable for highly regulated industries. In regulated industries, actions and changes to content and data need to be fully auditable and secure, with the ability to track exactly who does what, where and when.

To provide businesses with the right levels of security and tracking, a collaboration platform needs features such as user access controls and permissions. New internal and external users should be given access to the system with pre-defined permissions and security controls. For example; time-limited access that is automatically revoked; single sign-on giving an external party 24hr access to a document to sign, and set user types with permissions like read-only, edit or send task.

One example of this may be an employee in one department who needs to collaborate on a project with another department; they gain temporary access to contribute to just one document or data set, without having access to other confidential information.

Tools that can deliver on the needs of regulated industries are few and far between, but the CARA™ Platform combines the necessary collaboration functionality with world-class security features.

2. Collaboration in decentralised teams

One of the most common struggles for decentralised teams is collaborating across different locations and time zones. The use of multiple local, siloed systems can hinder communication and collaboration between departments, encouraging different processes for managing documents and data even within one location.

To collaborate efficiently and in a unified manner, decentralised teams need a global cloud-based platform providing all areas of the business with central access to data and documents. They need the ability to work securely and simultaneously on documents; seeing updates in real-time without waiting for each individual to contribute to and pass on the master copy. The platform also needs the security to ensure that only the right people have access to the right content, with version control allowing users to revert to earlier stages of a document when needed.

With CARA, organisations benefit from a unified, cloud-based platform that allows users, teams, and organisations to collaborate effectively. It saves businesses hours of time on projects, reduces the number of avoidable meetings, and keeps back-and-forth email threads to a minimum – something many would be thankful for.

3. Ease of access to information

Instead of tying a job role to a particular team, department, set of responsibilities, and processes, modern roles are increasingly fluid, with different fingers in lots of departmental pies. And why shouldn’t your systems mirror this new-work-order? For a platform to support such an agile way of working, all content and data should be easy to access and work with across departments – not managed and contained in a silo.

Businesses need a platform with a single, organisation-wide information lake where information entered once can be retrieved and reused. Ease of access to information on this scale is perfect for collaborative work; you can share contracts between departments for review and approval, share SOP’s with external parties, and deliver data analysis to different teams seamlessly.

Teams can leverage CARA’s industry-leading information lake for enterprise-wide access to data and content at speed, finding what they need and identifying links between information and processes; supporting the modern ‘fluid role’ paradigm.

4. Efficient communication with external stakeholders

The benefits of secure collaboration stretch beyond remote teams and employees, providing a way for clients, partners, and other external affiliates to monitor the progress of a project in real-time and offer feedback in an ongoing manner. Real-time collaboration with clients reduces the number of regular reviews and saves time and money on late-stage changes, but many regulated businesses pass up on these benefits due to fears that the work can’t be controlled, traced, and scrutinised.

So it’s essential that a collaboration platform has security measures in place when external users are granted access. All activity needs to be completely audited, and controls such as detailed role-based security, time-limited access, and dynamic access to even single objects delivers the confidence to collaborate on sensitive information.

5. Increased efficiency

The benefits of secure collaboration extend far beyond the ones mentioned above. But, in the end they all lead to one thing: an improvement in efficiency. Improved business efficiency is the holy grail of business goals; a simpler workflow, clearer communications and easier access to information all mean work gets done faster. But, regulated businesses can’t sacrifice security at the expense of efficiency, the two must go hand-in-hand.

In regulated industries, good security measures are key, this is why  our users have moved away from some of the traditional tools available on the market in favour of the CARA Platform. A collaboration platform that supports organisation-wide use must allow you to define what content and information is available to some, and restricted to others. By allowing external access, the platform must make it easy to set defined permissions and audit any changes made to information. Done right, organisations can increase their efficiency as a whole, while knowing that their data and content is secure.

Find out more about CARA’s Secure Collaboration capabilities here.