Cloud Security: Part 2
Many small business owners have employed the cloud during these challenging economic times. Business owners can conserve money by utilizing programs within the cloud, from Photoshop alternatives to project-management tools. Nevertheless, the cloud can be a bit questionable when it comes to security. Documents stored in the cloud can be jeopardized or damaged.
Password issues
The greatest security issue that company owners face with regards to cloud computing happens to also be the biggest security issue that users also face when it comes to computing: passwords which are either too simple to guess or shared too freely.
Business owners should be careful to choose passwords to their cloud projects which are difficult for others to guess. The best option is for owners to include a blend of letters and numbers in their passwords. Owners should also be cautious about sharing their passwords with too many people. The more people who have access to passwords, the more vulnerable important data and documents are.
Hacker alert
Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just as they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers each day. The thing that makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names -- companies like Microsoft and Google -- must supply their own security for the material that business owners store in the cloud.
Common sense protection
Protecting yourself from theft in the cloud can be as simple as applying some common sense practices.
First, owners should consider what kind of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a business if it is lost or stolen, may not be ideal for cloud storage. Instead, this data might be better preserved on a business owner's individual computing system and dependably backed up.
Secondly, before giving every employee free access to cloud-stored data, think carefully about which employees actually needs access to that information. People are often careful about protecting their laptops and desktop computers from prying eyes; this attitude should be applied to the cloud as well.