We live in an age where businesses are constantly on the alert for information leaks: consider the landmark Sony Hack to the recent Tesla emails. The challenge for businesses is staying in control of their narrative when that happens. Too often, the media spins a story that doesn’t show the full picture or exposes sensitive information that can hurt businesses. When businesses lose control of their narrative, reputations suffer, deals are lost, and critical IP and trade secrets get compromised. How can businesses stay in control of their narratives during an information leak? By staying in control of their information at all times.

Witness the case of a Wall Street Journal journalist who got fired after leaked texts and emails showed a supposed conflict of interest with his reporting—only those texts were taken out of context. Imagine if he and his employer were able to protect their information from being leaked and selectively edited. Or consider the energy and utilities industry after a series of natural disasters in 2018. State utility companies faced flak from the media for their supposed lack of preparation. But some businesses—like Florida Power & Light—had actually invested significant efforts into recovery and were able to respond quickly to their customers’ needs. Imagine if, instead of having to go on the defensive, Florida Power & Light had been able to focus on their quick response to their customers’ needs.

While there are things you can do like build consumer trust through transparency and have a crisis communications plan (see our take on that here), the absolute most important thing you can do is stay in complete control of your information at all times. This means having an encrypted communication tool with enterprise policies to business-wide controls, making sure confidential information never linger on devices, all while meeting compliance requirements. That means avoiding sharing confidential information via insecure tools like email, Slack or SMS text.

Using the right tool for communications plays a huge role in keeping you in control of the narrative. When you use Vaporstream, information is never stored on devices or saved to the cloud, while still meeting regulatory requirements. That means you don’t have to worry that your communications could be intercepted, screenshotted, forward, or shared.Learn how we keep you in control of the narrative here.