The cloud can be a blessing for small business owners fighting through tough economic times. Rather than purchasing costly enterprise software, business owners can save their dollars by accessing powerful computing programs in the cloud, from high-end word processors and project-management tools to spreadsheets and Photoshop alternatives. But, the cloud isn’t perfect, particularly when it comes to security issues. Entrepreneurs must be aware that their documents, presentations, and marketing materials can be damaged when they’re stored in the cloud.
Password issues
One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the greatest security issues outside of the cloud.
You should always carefully select passwords to your projects stored in the cloud. The more complicated your passwords are the more difficult they are to guess. A great way to accomplish this is to use a combination of numbers and letters in your passwords. Also, you shouldn’t share these passwords with many people.
Hacker alert
Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just like they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers everyday. The thing that makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must provide their own security for the data that business owners store in the cloud.
Common sense protection
Protecting yourself from theft in the cloud can be as simple as applying some common sense practices.
First, owners should consider what sort of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a company if it is lost or stolen, may not be suitable for cloud storage. Instead, this data may be better preserved on a business owner’s individual computing system and reliably backed up.
Secondly, before giving every employee free access to cloud-stored data, think carefully about which employees actually needs access to that information. People are often careful about protecting their laptops and desktop computers from prying eyes; this attitude should be applied to the cloud as well.
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