You could lose money if someone were to steal your products rather than purchase them. Having someone make off with your office supplies would be irritating, but you could probably replace them. Having someone make off with your data, however, could put you out of business entirely.
Keeping up with IT security issues is difficult for all kinds of companies, but particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who may not have someone employed in a CIO-type role. With most aspects of daily operations moving online, however, there is an ever-increasing number of risks that need to be avoided.
Hackers have grown increasingly sophisticated in how they target companies with malicious software, or malware. It can infect your network and transfer customer records (or even banking credentials) back to their own server. It could be as simple as tricking you or an employee into clicking on a link in an email.
Some cybercriminals will launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. This is a technique where your website gets flooded with requests from an outside source. It can render your site completely inoperable. This includes your ability to conduct e-commerce transactions. The result can damage your reputation with customers.
Not all attacks come from the outside, unfortunately. IT security experts have often warned about the risk of an internal threat — namely, an employee who decides to steal data from their own company. In other cases, the employee may have left the company (or was fired) but nobody thought to turn off their access to the network.
Finally, there are also risks that come from unforeseen events like the weather. A severe storm can lead to a power outage. When that happens, companies that haven’t thought through their backup and recovery plans could find themselves with data that is lost because it wasn’t saved. This could include customer orders.
If you’ve put off learning more about cloud computing until now because it seemed complicated, the fact that it can help fend off all of these security challenges might make you ready to get into the details.
Many companies initially invested in cloud-based apps and infrastructure because it helped them get the IT resources they needed to grow their business. That’s still an excellent reason to make the move, but consider the security benefits you get at the same time:
Defence against attacks
One of the most common reasons hackers are able to infiltrate a company’s computer systems is that the software running on them is often old or out of date. Like anything else, applications that have been in the market for a while develop glitches, or the companies realize they have a hole of some kind that makes them vulnerable.
Most software developers make sure to offer new versions of their products on a regular basis, or patches that their customers could apply over the security holes. When you’re running all your software locally, though, that means frequently upgrading and patching, which a lot of companies find time-consuming and expensive to do.
The cloud computing model means your applications aren’t running locally, however. Instead, your cloud provider can make sure you’re always running the most up-to-date, fully patched version of your software, which reduces the risk of malware considerably.
Cloud providers also have teams trained to monitor and detect other forms of potential threats, including DDoS attacks, so you don’t have to feel completely on your own from an IT security perspective.
Protection from internal threats
Cloud-based apps allow you to put all your most important data in a virtual space, where they can be accessed at any time by anyone you’ve authorized on your team.
That helps a lot in terms of collaboration, but it also makes it easier to remove access, rather than having to go around and physically change settings on an individual computer or workstation.
It’s also possible to encrypt data once it’s been stored in the cloud. Even if a rogue ex-employee were to attempt to make off with the data, they wouldn’t be able to do much with it until it’s been decrypted.
Bear in mind that not all internal threats are intentional, either. An employee might leave their laptop sitting somewhere they shouldn’t, or lose it entirely. Having your company’s data in the cloud means you can remotely shut off access or wipe the device so it can’t be used by whoever finds it.
Peace of mind in emergencies
The same safeguards that reduce the risks on individual employee devices applies to your entire company. When you have all your data running in the cloud, you don’t have to have a room filled with servers.
It won’t matter if you experience a power outage, a flood or even a fire that brings down your entire building. The virtual nature of the cloud will keep all your data offsite and ready for you whenever you need to recover it.
Downtime of any kind often turns off customers and can make it difficult for an SMB to recover from setbacks that aren’t really their fault. The cloud removes the stress of those potential disasters.
If much of your workforce needs to do their jobs remotely, cloud computing can also keep data as safe as if everyone were doing their jobs in the same building. These are just some of the security benefits the cloud can offer. If you work in a regulated industry like financial services, cloud-based solutions can even help you achieve compliance.
Finally, IT security incidents can be truly devastating to an SMB from a cost perspective. Among the many advantages of the cloud is that you’re saving that money, and putting it back where it belongs — in all the areas that will contribute to the ongoing growth of your business.
