Cloud at Work

Recently my friend shared me a link to download ‘Dropbox’ and wants me to share my latest excursion’s pictures. I stole a few minutes from my busy schedule and followed the instructions to get Dropbox to my desktop. I heard a lot about cloud storage but never knew it would make my life easy when it comes to sharing photos. I dragged all my pictures into the newly added Dropbox folder and quickly shared a URL with my friend to access photos through web interface. Surely the experience of sharing heavy files effortlessly and instantly was incredible, but installing own cloud storage at work, isn’t a potential risk to information security?

 The cloud based file sharing services is a file hosting service, which provides storing and sharing data services. The stored data can be accessed from any internet browser. Dropbox, Google Drive, skydrive, iCloud and Octopus are some popular cloud storages. The convenience of keeping personal data safe and within the reach has attracted the largest corporate crowd ever. A survey report shows 89 percent of employees have personal accounts on cloud storage services out of which 70 percent storage is done for work purpose and 22 percent employees store company’s critical data.

Any employee who stores data in his/her personal account or storage automatically falls under data breach. Companies confront critical fallouts because of data breaches from insider data theft and accidental loss by employees. IT professionals believe that cloud storage is one of the biggest loopholes in the data security system, which has fetched many security challenges. Cloud has obscured the data prevention strategies by IT team. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute said on cloud sharing services, “We're acutely aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences that can occur as a result of security breaches of these tools”.

To combat the security risks, it’s important to stay updated and aware of emerging and existing threats and vulnerabilities in the company.  Here are some suggestion to mitigate the gamut of threats and security risks:

• ·         Employee awareness workshops on information security.
• ·         Install Filter content and block websites.
• ·         Set Firewalls and use anti-virus software to protect PC.
• ·         Set up Risk and compliance policies.
• ·         Incidence Report team for investigation.
• ·         Regular audits by Risk management team.
• ·         Monitor employee computer activities.

Implementation of policies, blocking websites, and filtering content or training programs sometimes doesn’t help in mitigating data breaches. Web Proxy is an alternate for many employees to surf blocked websites which bring online threats to the information security. Hence, it’s critical to identify outliers and failure modes for effective analysis to diminish perils.