As more and more businesses converge to online work, it has become incredibly important to ensure your workflows are both efficient and secure.
When your team collaborates online, you cannot afford to lose sensitive data. This could include your customer’s private information, top-secret product blueprints, third-party contractor details, or financial information.
If this information was to fall into the wrong hands, it could mean disaster for your company.
For example, if you were to hand over your financial details unwillingly to a cyber hacker, they could potentially gain access to your accounts and drain them. It does not need to be spelled out how damaging this could be for your business in both the short and long term.
However, the problem with remaining secure online is that it is quite hard to do efficiently.
If you are busy saving, storing, and transferring information slowly and methodically, your team’s productivity will plummet, and the entire reason for working online (greater efficiency) will be negated.
Working in the cloud is a fantastic solution to this, but it still leaves the danger of someone nefarious gaining access to your account.
This is why you have to secure your business’s cloud accounts:
You may not have full visibility
One of the challenging aspects of operating a business online is maintaining visibility over the entire network.
If you run a large organization with a sprawling network, it is virtually impossible to stay abreast of what every employee is doing, what accounts they have access to, and whether there are weaknesses in your infrastructure which need to be addressed.
This is true when it comes to your cloud accounts. While the accounts themselves may be secure, you have no visibility or control over the channels between the accounts, meaning they could be compromised or the information intercepted.
To tackle this problem, it is wise to consider a cloud security solution that provides you with full protection and visibility over your cloud estate. You can find out more about this here.
Your accounts are only as safe as the passwords
Another reason you need to ensure your cloud accounts are secure is that they are only as safe as the passwords you set. Although many cloud services require you to use two-factor authentication, some don’t.
If your passwords are easily guessable, weak, or have been used elsewhere, then you are leaving your business open to data theft. An obvious approach to fixing this is to make sure you set stronger passwords and keep rotating them periodically.
You may lose track of who has access
Lastly, a common reason why cloud accounts get compromised is that business managers lose track of who has access to which files. If you grant access to a cloud storage account to an employee, then you must lock them back out again once their task or project has been completed.
This will prevent passwords from falling into the wrong hands – whether this is a disgruntled ex-employee or a professional hacker.
