Catch Up Core Things That Are Required to Protect Enterprises Data On Cloud

One of the phishing attacks on Microsoft Office 365 resulted in compromising SharePoint documents across several companies that access the Microsoft productivity suite. (Download the complete report) This was hardly the only threat to organizations in past years. It had been found that Ransomware threats have increased rapidly over the last 2 years and as a result, businesses have suffered from the loss on an average of $833,716.53 annually. 

Business clients have to understand and realize the fact that they have the major responsibility of protecting enterprise data in the cloud. Therefore, today in this post we are going to cover important standards that an organization should adopt. These standards will make readers aware of core operations that a company has to achieve if their data is stored online.

1. Conduct Email Protection Training – Today’s education system still does not comprise of any subject through which students have been taught about Cybersecurity measures. The employees working in your premises may once have been students with inefficient knowledge about the measures needed to protect enterprise data on the cloud. This means that there is an essential need to educate employees about cloud data security challenges and solutions and how to overcome them.
   
   It is the role of businesses to conduct awareness sessions weekly to make employees aware of cloud computing security challenges and measures to be overcome them. Until and unless companies educate employees with their existing Cybersecurity measures, they cannot blame an employee when a threat occurs. So, motivate officials to immediately report any suspicious email they encounter, instead of opening it or responding over it. This will block emails from that particular sender address and warn other employees as well to be safe.
   
   
2. Deeply Monitor Officials Activities – In today’s date, every industry owner might be known with the fact that ‘employees play a major role in either growing the business or diminishing it.’ It is the efforts of a team of employees who take companies at their success or failure stage. This means that initially, industries have to monitor their employee's work. It may seem that business officials are trying their best in protecting enterprise data stored on the cloud, including the personal records of clients. But, what about human mistakes, their careless/irresponsible attitude while doing the work? It has been observed that the major reason behind data leakage incidents is irresponsible nature or unintentional human mistakes. To be safe from attacks that are caused due to these reasons, it is essential to monitor the employees’ activities. You should check the operations carried away with sensitive business contents by employees working in your company.
     
3. Implement Data Access Controls – When your business information gets stored online, it automatically goes in the hand of a cloud service vendor. Being a CSP’s customer, you control only user access and here comes a significant vulnerability point. According to Gartner, by the year 2022, at least 95% of cloud protection failures will be caused only because of human mistakes. IT industries have to take care of ‘principles of least privileges’ through the configuration of read and write permissions. This will help in granting employees only the permissions they need. Also, businesses should now begin use of multi-factor authentication to ensure that an account has been accessed by an authorized entity.  
   
   
4. Make Use of Encryption Algorithms – Especially in realms of small firms, it is essential to use encryption algorithms to protect enterprise data. It is particularly recommended for small firms because they are unable to financially afford advanced systems. There is a broad range of methods for the conversion of sensitive content into non-understandable statements. The well-known method in today’s scenario is encryption of incoming and outgoing information behind firewalls that means that you can encrypt information at the individual level and maintain an organizational hold of confidential data.  
   
   
5. Launch Holistic Management View – The role of a cloud architecture services provider is to provide an efficient, secure, and reliable hardware performance to end users. But, the role of customers is to ultimately ensure that guest operating machines are completely patched and compliant with baselines of security. Cloud security experts recommend an individual management console to achieve a holistic security view across all platforms. For example – Microsoft renders management products to analyze things across on off-premises as well as on-premises.  
   
   
6. Give Time to Design A Retention Strategy – This point to protect enterprise data recommends enterprises take the backup of cloud data and delete it from the storage location. This helps in enhancing the performance and increase the amount of free space on the cloud. For companies under regulatory stress, the out of the box default settings in cloud solutions do not get the job completely done. It is essential to create a replica copy of confidential cloud information at an entirely different storage location. These backups need to be platform-agnostic, complete, and most importantly, organizations must have a workable recovery strategy too. This strategy will prove itself useful at the time of recovery in case a threat occurs. Ensure that your chosen recovery plan works rapidly and retrieve back complete backed up data.

It’s Time to Conclude

The important points to protect enterprise data online majorly demand the attention of companies’ owner towards Cybersecurity. Showing careless attitude towards cloud computing security will definitely result in data breach incident occurrence or cybercrime. Therefore, it is better to adopt at least core 6 standards to secure confidential business information stored on the cloud storage.