Blog, Cloud
Moving that data to the cloud brings many advantages, fostering a highly productive work environment, helping businesses to meet consumers needs with speed and agility, reducing upfront costs and protecting businesses in the event of the disaster or any other disruption.But there is also another face when we talk about data security.
Company’s data is not securely tucked away in the office, but moving seamlessly among employees, computers, tablets, and other smart devices, with instant access to customers, or to anyone who has hands on your data.
In fact, your critical data is not in your control at all, it’s in the knowledge of many people all at once, and if they are not aware of cyber threats, this can send your data in the hands of the wrong people.
As small businesses are likely to have fewer resources to devote to cybersecurity and less expertise to monitor threats to IT systems, they are generally more prone to cyber attacks, according to experts.
Various reasons why small businesses are vulnerable to data breaches:
- Absence of legal expertise and specialist security
- Fewer processes and controls
- Remote work processes with less secure Wi-Fi
- Small businesses give a ‘back door’ to global clients
- Security questioned emails, websites, and payment processes
- Loopholes that lead to data loss
As the cloud is a growing technology to secure data from cyber attacks, SMB’s need to care about cloud security due to various reasons:
Exploiting errors
Whether malicious or not, human error is one of the reasons on the grounds of data breaches and cyber-attacks, as experts declaring it responsible for as many as 95 percents of cyber blunders.
The data breach can occur due to various reasons for example employees unintentionally forwarding confidential information to the wrong email, loss of company’s gadgets, using default passwords or with criminal intent. With so many risks looming around, many small businesses don’t have trackers, training, and communication to solve security challenges of this kind.
Data Integration
When it comes to data integrity, no enterprise can compromise on it. Data integrity refers to protecting data from unsolicited deletion, remodeling, or fabrication.
Managing entity's admittance and rights to specific business resources ensure that critical data and services are not misappropriated, abused, and stolen.
Data integrity is attainable with a standalone system with the separate database. The continuity of data integrity of the independent system takes place by database transactions while database management system (DBMS) ends up it. The rule of transactions that enterprises should follow to ensure integrity is ACID that is atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
Authorization is a way to manage the access to data. It is a technique which determines the extent of access a particular authenticated user has to the data.
Phishing attacks
Phishing is a severe cyber-attack when an attacker sends emails to various recipients, showcasing the reputable status of a company. The email will contain catchy information with hidden malware link or attachment that motivates to enter sensitive account and password details. Spear-phishing is a targeted attack on a specific company or individual.
Despite much awareness about frequent attacks via email links, many phishing emails are still able to manipulate and convince about their reliability. As hackers get a secure gateway, they become more confident to break tightened security networks.
Prone to these attacks, small businesses look up to cloud computing to get the robust data backups solution within real time. No doubt, cloud secures data, but the tag of security issues is still there because of malicious attacks like Ransomware.
Threat oriented security frameworks
Many SMB’s don't have required resources to deploy robust firewalls and high-security patches, resulting in data loss in case get attacked. Cybersecurity is a multifaceted problem that needs the updated technology and the strategic planning and processes in place.
As SMEs are unlikely to have technical experts internally, the only solution is to depend on the third-party to deploy robust firewalls with an upgraded security patches. But even that’s not enough on its own, as the employee elements also need to consider like risk assessments, the security policies, and access controls.
Wrapping up
It’s easy to ignore the fact that data accompanies your employees on-site and off-site the office premises, and that it needs to be secured at all times.
Small businesses don’t have high budgets to spend on protecting their online systems. However, there are smart and secure steps they can take to increase their online security including using the cloud vendors with the advanced security protocols.”
If your business is budding, you can even take help from agencies which carry expertise and provide training to guide you the best of the cloud.