Sharing policy overview

Sharing policies allow you to control how users share files with others. When you create a sharing policy, you define who users can share files with, the types of files that they can share, and how long their shared files can remain active. Connected lets users share files from their Connected folder or device backup set.

NOTE: If corporate security policy prohibits decryption of data on external systems and content sharing restrictions are enabled for your company, be aware that Connected uses decryption to support these restrictions.

If a user's effective sharing policy has content restrictions defined and they attempt to share a file, Connected must decrypt a copy of the file in the cloud to analyze its content. Although the decrypted copy gets deleted when analysis completes, servers external to your company briefly store the decrypted user data. If corporate security policy prohibits decryption of data on external systems, do not create sharing policies that support content restrictions. If you do, you permit Connected to decrypt data on its servers to support analyzing file content before sharing files.

The following list describes key concepts of sharing policies.

Policy components

Each sharing policy consists of the following components:

  • General details. Policy name, description, and scope (corporate or group level).

  • Recipient category. The type of recipients with which you allow or prevent users from sharing files. You can configure sharing rules for each of the following categories of people:

    •  Connected user. A user provisioned in your corporate Connected environment.
    • Private user. A person with an email address in one of the domains that you specify.
    • Public user. A person with an email address in any other domain.

  • Category-specific rules. Sharing rules that you define on a per-category basis:

    • Time restriction. Maximum number of days that shared files remain accessible to recipients.
    • File type restrictions. The types of files that you either allow or block users from sharing with recipients. In addition, Connected automatically blocks users from sharing a few system-level files.
    • Content restrictions. If content-specific sharing restrictions are enabled for your company, these restrictions let you prevent users from sharing files that contain personally identifiable information (PII). For more information, see Content-specific sharing restrictions.

Default share behavior

Users cannot share files unless you create a policy that allows them to do so.
Ability to lock categories

You can lock each recipient category to prevent rules in another policy from overriding them. See a detailed example.
Policy status

When you create a sharing policy, you can either publish it or save it as a draft. Published policies take effect immediately. The Policies page identifies the status of sharing policies using these icons:

  • icon for unpublished sharing policy  Unpublished draft

  • icon for published sharing policy  Published draft

    Policies with a draft in progress include the qualifier: Has Draft icon

For detailed information about the file sharing feature, see Sharing overview.