Product Habits - It all started with a contract

This used to happen to Marie and me all of the time.

After an intense vetting process, we’d bring on a new outside vendor. Forms were signed, Zoom calls had, and then we’d set off on our work together.

Marie is super organized, so to start, she would share a bunch of Google Docs with the team lead at the vendor to get them up to speed. There would be loads of confidential information in the documents, but there was no way around it. We had to share it or else no work could get done.

The engagement continued. The vendor would create loads of deliverables for our team. There’d be a weekly check-in document, but then there’s everything else they’re doing on our behalf. Some Google slides, a weekly Google Sheets document, and tons of Google Docs. Even some PDFs.

And the documents kept on flowing from us to them too. We shared more and more context with them in documents, and created more documents to facilitate their work.

Suddenly, hundreds of documents were created by us and the vendor, and dozens of internal and external stakeholders added. This is where my Co-Founder would start sweating. So much was shared that she couldn’t keep track of any of it.

Then, the project would conclude.

We hired folks to fill the gaps we had, and we got a ton of value from the outside vendor. Case closed.

Or was it?

A year later, Marie or I would be offboarding an employee and we’d notice something… weird. That vendor we worked with a year ago still had access to tons of company documents. And not just the project lead. There would be dozens of people from their domain on the documents. Did we really ever work with 68 people from the vendor? No, it was more like 5 or 6.

Who owned cleaning all of this up anyway? We’d quickly realize that no one offboarded the vendor from documents.

A few times we even saw a personal account with access to the documents that matched one of the vendor’s employees' names. We’d figure it must have been an accident, but we were never really sure.

Then came the frantic root cause assessment. Marie would start popping open old emails and diving into old documents the vendor made. That’s when she noticed not only did the documents have confidential information in them, but for some reason they all had public links too. Why would they have public links? Who accessed the documents? Did any confidential information leak?

At this point Marie’s head would be spinning. As a startup, we were working with dozens of vendors at a given time. Maybe even more. This problem would start to compound so quickly that we’d start to feel dizzy.

Who still had access to what? Could that access lead to data breaches? Leaked documents? Compliance issues?

If this story makes you nervous, you’re not alone. I’ve talked to hundreds of IT people who struggle with this every day. Very few companies have vendor offboarding processes that would solve these issues.

This is exactly the type of problem that Nira solves for. Nira is a real-time access control system focused on helping companies protect their information from unauthorized access.

Today, when we’re offboarding a vendor at Nira, it takes us seconds to remove their access, no matter how many vendor accounts have access. And no matter how many documents they have access to. We just offboarded two vendors in the last few days using Nira, and have 0 concerns about their access to documents.

Want to see Nira in action? Hit reply and I’ll send you a link to our demo video.

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Product Habits - It all started with a contract

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