Business owners are rightfully horrified at the idea that sensitive customer data or information can be exploited at any time. What is even worse, all of us have seen it happen. Individuals, corporations and celebrities have all had data that is sensitive stolen from the cloud and used for humiliation, extortion, identify theft, fraud and more.
It is tempting to stop using the cloud completely because of this threat of the loss of data but that just is not realistic. As your needs increase and you need more physical storage, the cloud is the most economical, convenient and easy to access choice rather than buying more physical storage space. Luckily, there are several things you can do to maintain security of your data in the cloud.
1. Use the Cloud Only For Data That Is Not Confidential
Before you decide to put your data in the cloud, you need to recognize that there is no fail safe way to protect all of your data from intruders. For this reason you might want to only keep the files that you use often and that have no confidential data to your cloud storage. This includes file such as:
- Data required to be secure for regulatory compliance
- Employee, patient, client or customer identifying information
- Passwords
- Information that is financially identifying
- Legal documents
- Corporate secrets
Even after weeding out these documents, you will probably have plenty of documents that can be stored in the cloud to make it worthwhile. You store those documents in the cloud and keep the data that is sensitive on secure servers.
2. Always Encrypt Data That Is Stored In the Cloud
Always encrypt any data that you upload to the cloud so that if anyone does get access to your files they will have trouble accessing them. There are two good options for this encryption.
You can either encrypt the data yourself or you can use the data encryption service of the service that stores your data. To be sure your data is totally secure, be sure to get advice from a reliable data security consultant.
3. Create a Backup Schedule
Once you have made the decision to store your data on the cloud, you might want to use the MSSQL backup program to make sure your data is regularly backed up and saved. This is actually an important part of your plans for disaster recovery. Adding online backup to external harddrives also makes sense. Doing your research bylooking and comparing cloud providers can be a wise move too.
4. Set Strong Company Polices Concerning Appropriate Cloud Access and Storage
The best benefit to having cloud storage is the fact that both you and your employees will be able to access and work on documents from almost anywhere. Unfortunately, this is also one of the main reasons why cloud storage is so risky. For that reason, you need to have a policy that refers to the following:
- Who is allowed to access and upload files from the cloud
- Reporting procedures for possible security breaches
- When and where employees are allowed to access data in the cloud
- A system to track access and changes
If nothing else, all employees need to know that they cannot use public computers when they are accessing the cloud.
5. Always Use Common Sense When Accessing the Cloud
A strong password phrase or password should always be required before users are able to access the cloud. Also, there should be multi-factor authentication in place in case someone in an unfamiliar remote location is trying to access the data. Generally, it should always be more difficult to access cloud storage than a social media account.
