By Michael Brown 1

The cloud undoubtedly has its many benefits. It’s accessible from many devices, it’s scalable, sharable, and supports dozens of apps that can be useful to you in your professional or personal life and offers almost infinite backup and storage. But it’s these very features that you find valuable that also put you at risk for a data breach. And that's something that managed service providers (MSPs) who offer cloud-based file sharing services, must protect against.

A report by Ponemon Institute titled “Data Breach: The Cloud Multiplier Effect” addresses these concerns, and highlights the ways in which the risk of a data breach in the cloud is multiplying. It is therefore the job of MSPs to address and ease these justified worries. Through educating, making aware, and preparing your users, minimizing and mitigating security threats is very possible even as the Cloud expands. Here’s a look at how.

Applications

The report is based on a sample of 613 IT and security professionals in the United States who are familiar with their company’s cloud, yet 64 percent believe that using cloud resources reduces their ability to secure business critical applications.

In fact, the survey found that 36 percent of business-critical applications are housed in the cloud, yet IT isn’t aware of half of them.

First and foremost, IT should be fully aware of what applications are running in their cloud service. An MSP can help you figure this out and prioritize them so that apps which are most vulnerable to leaking sensitive information are housed in a place you can always be monitoring them.

Scalability and Sharability

The study found that the second greatest cost to a company when a breach occurs in the cloud is when an organization’s primary cloud service provider expands operations too quickly and experiences financial difficulties. The first greatest cost is the increase of backup and storage of sensitive and/or confidential customer information in the cloud.

The study also found that 50 percent of employees are using cloud and bringing their own devices to connect to the cloud.

In this case, the only thing that MSPs can do is to educate or warn clients of this risk, and stress how the probability of a data breach increases by 124 percent if the number of employee-owned mobile devices increases by 50 percent over a year.

Certain activities that involve a lot of sharing also increase the risk of a breach by a significant amount. The less sharing, the more secure.

Responsibility

The study finds that 55 percent of employees don’t believe that the IT security leader is responsible for ensuring the organization’s safe use of cloud computing resources.

An MSP should instill confidence and educate the IT leader to ensure best practices and not rely on functions outside security to protect data.

At the end of the day, it is the company’s choice to house company information in the cloud, therefore they should be held accountable.

How secure do you feel putting your sensitive information on the cloud? Leave a comment in the section below.