The Risk of Data Breaches In the Cloud

The cloud is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes increase productivity, save money and scale their operations. While these are all positive developments, there can also be a downside to the cloud. Hackers routinely target cloud services and businesses using the cloud to steal data or otherwise cause harm to the organization.

Many organizations are largely unaware of how often their data gets compromised online or how much it can cost (lost revenue, reputation damage, disrupted operations, legal fees, reparations, etc.) in the long term. Today, we’re looking at the risk of data breaches in the cloud, why they happen and what you can do about it.

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What Is The Risk of a Data Breach in the Cloud?

Data breaches seem like they occur more and more frequently. There’s a reason for that. Businesses have more assets to attack and have largely moved a significant amount of their operations to the cloud.

Although the cloud has plenty of benefits, it can be susceptible to attacks or security issues. Services like Amazon AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure have millions of users. More access points means more attack vectors for hackers.

Companies can also be susceptible to insider threats from malicious or careless employees. Staying on top of current trends, reinforcing cybersecurity measures, and using security software/routines can help prevent breaches but sometimes they can happen anyway despite our best efforts.

Data Breach Frequency

A significant problem that’s emerged concurrently with widespread cloud adoption is the event of a data breach. There’s a good likelihood you’ve been impacted by a data breach personally or professionally because they happen more frequently each year.

Approximately 79% of organizations have experienced at least one data breach in the last two years. This is such a large issue for companies because of how it impacts both consumers and their organizations. Data breaches negatively impact consumers by exposing them to identity theft or compromising their financial information (or much worse).

They also hurt businesses by causing loss of productivity, negative media coverage, reputation damage, compliance fines/penalties and other adverse consequences.

The Importance of Data Integrity On The Cloud

Another part of reinforcing cloud security is improving your data integrity. Data integrity-how consistent and accurate your data is-is crucial to the success of any business. Data integrity ensures that all data is accurate and reliable while helping prevent bad data from making its way into your network.

Proper data integrity and data governance procedures help ensure your data’s security. Data governance helps you classify where your data goes and can help you identify corrupt or bad data. Keeping tight access controls (IAM controls) help keep access to data limited and confined to those with the proper privileges, further bolstering your data security.

Notable Data Breaches

If you think you might be immune to data breaches or think it’s unlikely one will affect you, remember that they often strike unexpectedly. Breaches can happen to anyone-even companies with strong security measures in place. In 2017, Equifax-the prominent credit reporting agency-fell victim to a massive data breach affecting over 147 million Americans.

And what did the thieves steal? Social Security numbers, personally identifiable information, and financial details. If that wasn’t bad enough, Target was hit by a similar breach only four years earlier. Even LinkedIn and Uber aren’t immune. The former was hacked in 2012 while the latter was hit by an ongoing breach that compromised user data for a three-year period between 2013 and 2016.

More recently, T-Mobile fell victim to an attack that affected the personal details of more than 50 million customers (many of which were later found for sale on the Dark Web). New breaches happen daily and reinforcing cloud security is one of the best ways to protect your-and your customers-data.

What To Do About It

The best way to protect your company’s cloud from data loss, hacks, platform issues, and other threats is to set up data security protocols. It starts with using a decent cloud provider. Your provider should always be in compliance with industry standards, have a good reputation, and be able to keep your cloud secure.

On your end, you must keep employees informed about potential threats and how to prevent them. Consider instituting organizational policies to ensure employees are safeguarding their credentials, using company resources properly, and complying with your standards. Use multi-factor authentication on all accounts, including those at your own network (and especially with third-party applications).

Don’t forget to encrypt data. Sometimes the best way to attain high data security in the cloud is to use automated protection software that secures your network, applications, containers, and everything else in your hybrid cloud.

But in the end, the best thing you can do is be aware of the risks associated with data breaches and invest in cloud security measures before becoming the victim of the next major breach.