Security in the Cloud: Part 2

Many small business owners have utilized the cloud during these challenging economic times. Business owners can save money by utilizing programs within the cloud, from Photoshop alternatives to project-management tools. Nevertheless, the cloud can be a bit questionable when it comes to security. Documents stored in the cloud can be compromised or damaged.

Password issues

One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the biggest security issues outside of the cloud.

Business owners must be careful to select passwords for their cloud projects which are challenging for others to guess. The best solution is for owners to include a blend of letters and numbers in their passwords. Owners should also be cautious about sharing their passwords with a lot of people. The more people who have access to passwords, the more in danger important data and documents are.

Hacker alert

A few serious problems that will not soon go away for anybody who uses a computer are hackers, malware, and spyware. As business owners have little control over how secure the cloud is this aspect of security can be very alarming indeed. Companies like Microsoft and Google must create their own security measures to protect the data stored in the cloud.

Common sense protection

There are a couple common-sense practices that will help protect small business owners who choose to keep information in the cloud.

First, owners should consider what type of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a business 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, be careful about who is allowed access to the data stored in the cloud. It seems obvious that business owners protect their laptops and desktops with passwords. The same should be applied to the cloud.