How safe are you in the Cloud? – Few Tips to Protect your critical data

It is pretty tough to imagine today’s information technology without the cloud storage. It has come to a time where even little children have their own online storage spaces to store their school materials. Therefore, it is needless to say that businesses use cloud storage generously. A majority of these businesses have high-risk data stored in the cloud. This is where a concerted security concern arises. Cloud storage is definitely the best investment a company can make but being secure is of drastic importance.

Who/what should we be afraid of?

1. Unauthorized access: Wrong people prying into data they are restricted to.
2. Hackers: They are well known for breaching all kind of security protocols.
3. Data Thieves: A sub-genre of hackers who are more into stealing information.
4. Data Loss.

For the four of these, monitoring, data encryption, backup and setting privileges can be done with efficiency. Here are other general practices to keep your data in the cloud untouched and safe.

1. When you select your cloud storage provider, read the vendor contract properly. Verify if they are good with security. If the contract uses weak words such as ‘try’, ‘only as much as possible’, try finding a better vendor who promises better security with stronger words.
2. Can you recognize these? ‘password’ ‘1234’ ‘<company’s name>’. These are the usual passwords. There are more chances of security breaches due to weak passwords such as these. Therefore, one must use strong passwords.
3. Consider storing data in-house for very sensitive types. If not, be very sure that your vendor guarantees you and you are completely confident of their security provision. Re-check with your vendor if they allow third-party access to your storage.

Follow cloud vendors and security experts in websites such as Twitter. They constantly post if there are any security threats, spyware epidemic or any other possible breaches. They also post tips and strategies for a safer storage.

Use cloud, but be secured!