How Safe Is Cloud Storage?

4/9/2013

How Safe Is Cloud Storage?

Storing data in the cloud has many benefits but it can cause some concern as well, especially when confidential data is being stored. We have all heard of the incidents with Amazon S3, Evernote, and other companies that have relations with the cloud. These incidents have shown that even the companies with the best security measures around are not completely invulnerable to security breaches. So what exactly does that mean for those of us that store data on cloud storage servers? How secure are the files that we store in the cloud? There are many businesses and individual users that use Amazon S3 to store data, some of it confidential and sensitive data.

Amazon tells its users how to protect their data that is stored on Amazon's servers, then it allows the user to decide how they want to best protect the data, which data (if any) should be open to the public and which data should remain secure and private. But a recent study showed that many businesses leave sensitive data on public clouds, which further escalates the risk of the data falling into the wrong hands.

It's an all too familiar scenario- people giving up security in the name of convenience. Careless actions such as this can cost a company everything. The number one cause of security breaches is because of user error. Either security protocols were ignored or bypassed in the name of convenience, additional security measures such as two-factor authentication are not implemented because of convenience or ignorance, or passwords are created to be something simple and easy to use, which makes them easy to guess as well.

Protect against data loss with secure cloud backup

Data loss is another issue that can occur if a hacker is able to successfully compromise an account. While it's true that just the security breach is bad enough, a hacker still must have knowledge of what to do with the information and data stored in the account. If the hackers are unable to use the data for financial gain, they may just quietly slip away and leave the data undisturbed, or they may delete it just for fun or spite. This can be extremely devastating to a company that depends on that data for its everyday activities and transactions. In this instance, it would be very wise to have a cloud backup solution, such as cloudHQ. The cloudHQ cloud backup solution provides continuous replication of all data to a backup cloud account, usually through another cloud storage provider. For instance, if your company uses Google Drive for data storage, document creation, and collaboration on files with employees or clients, a backup account may be created through another cloud storage provider, such as Dropbox or Box. The cloudHQ service will continually monitor Google Drive for changes and any updates are automatically replicated to the backup cloud account. This ensures that you always have a secondary copy of all your data and don't have to worry about scheduled or manual backups like some other backup companies and programs offer.

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