The following is a commentary of an article originally published on CSO.com
A Call for Caution:
The vast majority of organizations trust public cloud storage services with their data more than they trust email and mobile devices. Yet few say they completely understand the security tools they have in place to ensure that this data won’t be compromised. Conventional wisdom suggests that this inconsistency does not bode well for any organization.
Email and mobile devices have been valuable business tools for decades now, and while we claim to completely understand them, we still have an inherent mistrust of their security because, let’s face it, we’ve all been burned before. The idea that we’re going to blindly trust this relatively new technology without putting in the effort to completely understand the tools that protect them seems imprudent.
What should you do?
There are any number of ways to protect yourself from vulnerabilities that this recent influx of cloud technologies bring.
You may choose to add to the responsibilities of your existing IT staff. The only issue with doing this is the fact that these new technologies aren’t only being used by your IT Department. Rather, many departments are adopting SaaS and cloud products, increasing the risk of using such tools because the end users may not be as suspicious of these technologies because they haven’t been trained to be suspicious. This will require a large amount of training and monitoring, likely to be led by IT professionals that are already crunched for time and resources.
So, maybe it’s time to hire a consultant. If you’re implementing a large scale SaaS product (like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo), this might be a viable option. Not only will they help customize these expensive SaaS products to your organizational needs, they can help train the end users on best practices regarding data management and security.
Yet not all SaaS products are large scale projects. Frequently, the departments that purchase them don’t even understand that they’re purchasing a cloud based product or at the very least, they never communicate that they’ve adopted such a product to the proper security professionals.
Having adequate backups and network monitoring becomes of paramount importance in this new, diverse technology landscape. Hiring a Managed Services partner, like ColoCrossing, can help. Feel free to contact a specialist for a consultation and get out ahead of any data security mishaps.
“Security practitioners now trust public cloud storage services with sensitive business data more than they trust email, social media, mobile devices and laptops, according to a survey of security practitioners that also suggested big-data analytics aren’t improving security as much as many would like to believe.
Forcepoint’s The Human Point research, based on a survey of 1252 cybersecurity professionals, found that while corporate data was being broadly distributed across different storage…”
