If Smartsheet, Inc. goes away, clients lose all data?

tylermh

The following was said at the office this week.  I know what my response is.  On the surface, I know Smartsheet offers sheet backups.  Also looking at the Smartsheet Trust Center page and Microsoft Trust Center at the similarities...but wanted to open this up for objective discussion:

“SmartSheet is not ours, that data does not belong to us…if the SmartSheet creator goes away, we lose it all.  With 365, we do own it, manage it, IT can take it over, move it, change creator, etc."

Now, Smartsheet Community, please discuss...  

Chris McKay

Agreed. Which is why we are seriously considering using O365 and Project Server in place of Smartsheet going forward.

Because of the lack of audit tools available in Smartsheet and because there is no Active Directory integration (e.g. SSO), there is no simple way to provide access controls and statistics across the whole Smartsheet instance. You can share sheets with anyone and I'd need to go searching through the logs to discover it. Group Policies cannot be implemented to circumvent this, which puts privacy law compliance into question.

tylermh

I appreciate the reply to my post, Chris.  Could you take a look at these links and see if it changes your understanding of Smartsheet and SSO, access, controls, Group Policies, etc.?

https://www.smartsheet.com/product/enterprise-deployment

https://www.smartsheet.com/security

 

Richard Rymill SBP

Tyler

I have just read this post and have to disagree with Chris but wish him luck with working with MS project and server! ( I suspect he will be back to Smartsheet fairly soon?) 

However to answer your original question... 

Do your Backups and there is no more risk with Smartsheet that 365, but back that up too! 

As for security. Just apply Due diligence and share best practise throughout your organisation and make sure your users and collaborators understand the risks of too much sharing and provide them with a methodology that protects everyone to your satisfaction.  That is where your need to focus your security. 

For example, when someone leaves the company, lock them out straight away, which is actually far more capable of control than emailing Project or excel files to people, who, once they have them, you cannot control what they do with them, which you can do in Smartsheet. 

Hope that helps and if you have any unanswered security questions then let me know and we will share what we know, which is that you need to be careful and diligent but don't we all? 

RichardR

Smarter Business Processes.