The cloud has become a hugely popular resource for businesses of all sizes to lean on for a multitude of needs, many using it for some form of data storage. While using the cloud for this means, however, it is wise for you to do everything available to secure the data you’ve stored there. Let’s go over a few things that we recommend you do to help protect your data.
While most cloud providers will maintain some pretty stringent security on their end, we cannot recommend strongly enough that you encrypt your data both as it is in transit and while it is stored in the cloud itself. This helps ensure that, even if your cloud data is somehow stolen, there is less of a chance that it will be of any value to the cybercriminal responsible in its jumbled and obscured state.
On the topic of data being somehow stolen, you need to be sure you are doing everything you can to avoid someone who should not have access to it getting that access. Fittingly, access controls are necessary to implement in order to avoid this. Restricting access based on each user’s role and needs is step one. Step two is to protect your cloud access behind multi-factor authentication measures. By combining these two elements, you not only make it less likely that someone can access your stored data, you limit what they can influence should they manage to do so.
Just keeping a close eye on your cloud storage and its contents can help you prevent security issues and incidents. Checking audit logs and utilizing some of the tools that many cloud providers offer make this much easier—and should you discover an issue, taking quick and decisive action is key to resolving it without incident.
Working with First Column IT means that you have an advocate on your side to help you manage your business’ IT, including your cloud solutions. Give us a call at (571) 470-5594 to learn more about what we have to offer businesses in Northern Virginia.
