As mentioned previously, Covid-19 has caused carnage worldwide and is showing no signs of going away just yet. Its effect on business has been far beyond what anyone could have predicted almost a year ago. Covid has delivered additional security challenges to businesses around the globe; the threat of cyber-attacks has risen; hackers have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to target businesses and make a fast buck.

Contrary to popular belief, the cloud is a secure place, and, as explored previously, delivers far greater value for money and flexibility than traditional methods.

“My data is not secure”, is a common concern when making the transition to the cloud. Business owners seem to be under the illusion that their data is not safe in the cloud, as it is not physically stored within their own direct control.

The fact your data is no longer directly stored within your own premises is, in fact, a good thing, making you more secure, as cloud services are housed in data centres off-site and have much greater levels of security and resiliency in place, than you would ever reasonably be able to implement at a local level.

Often, the data held in cloud services is encrypted – making it near impossible to be breached even by the most gifted of cyber criminals. It also eliminates the potential risk of your hardware being physically stolen – with your data being housed on-site a thief could theoretically steal your IT systems, and then your data is gone entirely.

If your current system were hit by a malware infection, such as a ransomware attack, it would expose potentially sensitive data to hackers – this could be further mitigated by storing your data securely away from your local computer devices in the cloud. However, whether your data is stored locally, within the cloud, or as a combination of the two, it is absolutely essential to back up your files to an entirely independent off-site service for a final failsafe barrier to recover from, should the worst occur.

We have established that migrating to the cloud is far more comprehensive and sophisticated in its cyber defences to protect your company’s data than most would ever consider.

There are different security considerations to make to ensure that you are migrating to the cloud, the right way. These include:

Where is my data stored?

Yes, it is stored on the cloud, but where is that Cloud? The servers that the information is stored upon could be abroad, which may mean your data is held under a different country’s laws and therefore potentially in breach of your own regulatory or legislative obligations – which may dictate you must not offshore your data outside of the UK.

It is essential to consider which countries your cloud service providers operate within, whether they offer a hosted service within the UK, if you can opt to contain your data within that on-shore hosting alone.

An insider threat

Granted, the threat from an insider may be unlikely or completely ludicrous in your eyes. But it does happen. Employees can use their fully authorised access to your cloud-based services to view or even take without permission certain files and sensitive information.

It is of the utmost importance within a migration plan to the cloud, to firstly consider implementing a grade-based access permission set, which ensures staff access to data and services is provided on a ‘need to know’ basis only.

You can further enforce best security practices by implementing strict password and IT use policies.

Each business will have its own set of challenges and concerns regarding the security of the cloud. The right IT provider will help you establish what these concerns are and how to alleviate them.

Need help to make a smooth and revised transition to the Cloud? Onebyte can help you!

Onebyte is the IT service provider that can help you make the transition to cloud infrastructure in the smoothest and most pain-free way possible. We have already helped many SMEs across London, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire. We can help you too!

We can guarantee to increase efficiency and empower our clients’ businesses to ensure the correct and most cost-effect use of technology. We provide a real return on the investment customers make in their IT and help them realise their vision for a secure, productive, modern IT infrastructure that can help them through this pandemic and beyond.