The security dangers associated with collaboration aren’t much different from those that IT security professionals have been dealing with for decades, but the real-time nature of collaboration — along with the need to give multiple users in many locations access to applications and content — creates new challenges when it comes to dealing with these threats.

To mitigate the risks, companies should examine collaboration in the context of security from a business perspective, by defining goals, policies, and patterns of usage at the outset of the project. They should also dig into the day-to-day aspects of authentication, authorization, and access control — so that collaboration tools and the content they handle are kept out of the wrong hands.