The cloud has made storing digital information easier than ever before. However, with this simplicity and accessibility comes a certain amount of risk and vulnerability to your information. But as a business, you can’t afford to have a scandal where the sensitive information you house gets into the wrong hands, be it insider information about your company or personal information from your customers or clients. So to help ensure that your use of the cloud doesn’t result in negative PR about your business and it’s loss of security, here are three tips for using the cloud for storing sensitive business information.
Picking the Right Service Provider
Not all cloud storage is the same. And in this same vein, not all cloud storage providers will be the same either. Knowing this, it’s important that you take the time to research the providers you’re considering in order to find the right one for your business needs. Chad Brooks, a contributor to Business News Daily, shares that some qualifications you should require from a cloud service provider you’re considering working with should include having a reliable infrastructure for housing information, showing you a reputable current client base, data centers all throughout the areas you service, and encryption capabilities. Without these characteristics, you can’t be sure that a service provider will be able to meet your security needs.
Use Encryption When Necessary
While it’s important for your storage service provider to encrypt any data you deem necessary, this by no means should suggest that you leave encryption solely up to them. In fact, Chuck Davis tells Nate Lord of DigitalGuardian.com that one of the biggest mistakes companies make with their own data security when using the cloud is not encrypting their own information. To ensure your data is as safe as possible when stored on the cloud, it’s a good idea to encrypt any and all sensitive or classified information before you even upload it to your cloud storage.
Prepare For The Unexpected
One of the likely reasons you’re planning to store your information on the cloud is so it can be safely kept for future reference or use. However, it can be easier than you might like to think to accidentally delete or alter your important information even in the cloud. So to keep your business from losing the data you need to hang on to, Jennifer Lonoff Schiff, a contributor to CIO.com, recommends ensuring you’re able to recover or restore your data if that ever becomes necessary. This feature can save you a lot of headaches if anything unfortunate happens with your data in the future.
If you’re considering using cloud storage for your sensitive business information in the future, remember the tips mentioned above to ensure your data is secured against potential harm or loss.
Originally posted on November 22, 2016 @ 5:06 pm