Page 58 - Security Today, October 2019

Why Are SMBs so Worried? Many organizational benefits include flexibility and productivity
BCy François Amigorena
loud storage is most used by small-and-medium businesses (SMBs). The reason is that it comes with many benefits for organizations in terms of flexibility and more importantly productivity.
However, it also comes with a number of technical-and-human risks that worries a majority of SMBs. A recent research shows that 61 percent of SMBs believe their data in unsafe in the cloud. Let us see the reasons why and what they
can do about it.
Technical Risks
What is worrying SMBs is that when you store your data in the cloud, you are not in control of it anymore, so they find it pretty hard to trust a third party with their valuable information.
The first technical risk concerns detecting unauthorised ac- cess. It is harder when your data in stored in the cloud. When
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stored on premise, a natural boundary is created against unau- thorised access by the need to be physically present in the office to access the data. For remote employees or partners using VPN, access can be restricted to specific devices only. On the contrary, once your data is stored in the cloud, it can be accessed from any- where in the world and on any device, significantly increasing the chance of unauthorised access.
The second risk pertains to employees stealing data before they leave the job. For the exact same reasons, it is easier for them to do so when data is stored in the cloud and much harder for the IT team to detect or stop it.
The third risk has to do with complex hybrid-storage envi- ronment (mix of on premise and cloud storage). Working with a hybrid environment increases productivity but makes manag- ing the security of the data stored across multiple environments very hard.
STORAGE SECURITY