The trend toward cloud adoption is apparent everywhere: in the home and in the workplace. For businesses, benefits of cloud adoption include convenience, flexibility, cost savings, ease of access, and rapid time to market.
Employees Adopt the Consumer Cloud for Work
Not surprisingly, individual employees and teams find that cloud services lower barriers and help them get more done, more quickly. For these reasons and others, many of them are bringing the consumer apps they use in their personal lives into the workplace. Although beneficial, not all services and applications adhere to corporate or regulatory security standards. This, combined with the fact that IT departments may be unaware, poses a cyber-risk in today’s interconnected world.
Free May Not Be Secure
Consumer file sharing and storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud are free services that can be helpful for personal use. But bring them into the enterprise and you have a potential security risk. Even though they may be helpful for workers and have a valid business use, cyber criminals can use these services in an attack. Just because you have a password doesn’t mean the service is secure. To safeguard intellectual property, it’s important for IT to beware of the risks, take precautions, and reach a balance between user-centric policies and data security.
Some of the Sensitive Data in the Cloud May be Yours
That’s a sobering thought. File sharing services, alone, can open a sizable gap in a company’s security measures. Either knowingly or unknowingly, file sharing users may upload sensitive information such as sensitive personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and payment card information. Chances are, some of the documents uploaded to file sharing services contain some sensitive data.
File Storage That’s Resilient for Business
Regularly backing up your files to an offsite storage service can help you recover more quickly from a lost laptop or server crash. It could even save your business, considering the fact that 43% of businesses never reopen after significant data loss. What should you look for? Choose business-class cloud storage solutions with end-to-end encryption in which only you can access the key. Also look for services that protect your files both in transit (while they’re being backed up) and at rest (in their storage location).
Services like cloud-based Data Backup encrypt your data locally, send it to the cloud encrypted, and store it there, encrypted. Only you can access the key. Plus, you can set your backup to occur automatically or on a schedule you determine, freeing IT resources from tracking backup schedules.
If you’d like some peace of mind with regard to your file sharing and storage needs, feel free to contact us at .
