As everyone is already quite aware, the global pandemic has drastically changed many aspects of our daily lives. A few years ago, if you asked your boss if you could work from home for a day, they probably would have laughed you out of the office. Today, a massive portion of the workforce is still working from home, and now many employers actually prefer it.
It’s quite the drastic change, but it was bound to happen. We were already in the digital transformation process, but COVID just sped it up a bit. However, if you’re wondering what that is and what it has to do with cloud services, this blog post on digital transformation and security risks in the public cloud will help clear everything up for you.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Let’s start with defining what exactly digital transformation is. It’s the process of switching from outdated, locally-sourced tools and channels that you use to perform business actions to more modern, digitized ones. It should be more evident as to why this has really taken off recently. The pandemic forced most people to stay home for quite a while. That means more people than ever shopped online, and people needed reliable ways to work while not being in the office. Companies had to adapt quickly to new technologies to survive.
How Does It Benefit Businesses?
Of course, this wasn’t a bad thing, though. Many benefits came from the sudden digitization of business systems. Consumers can now purchase almost anything they want, right when they want it. That means more impulse buying and less time wasted, two things product-based businesses love.
Also, employees have the freedom to work wherever they want. With pandemic-related mandates decreasing, companies have started allowing their staff to return to the office if they so choose, but they no longer require it in most cases. As long as employees have everything they need to continue comfortably working from home, there’s no need to rush back to the office, saving businesses money. For the companies that have decided not to go back to the office ever again, they are avoiding many extra expenses, such as rent and many other services that they were required to provide for their employees who were on location.
The most direct advantage is the decrease in the time it takes to run standard work processes. One of the main benefits of technology is how efficient it is in general. Because of tech’s rapid advancements, standard business procedures, such as internal messaging systems and sales platforms, run faster and better than ever before.
What Is Its Connection to the Cloud?
However, those examples are pretty minor when compared to cloud services. Usage of the cloud has skyrocketed in recent years—even before the pandemic hit. Companies love being able to access their data from either the office or at home, as being able to compute data in a way that was nearly impossible with local servers. All the pandemic did was cement the cloud’s usefulness. Businesses don’t want to lose the ability to give any employee quick and easy access to whatever information they need with a simple login, no matter where they are in the world.
How Is Cloud Security Now at a Higher Risk?
Unfortunately, some bad apples out there are determined to get their hands on data that’s not theirs at all costs, which is why we’re talking about digital transformation and security risks in the public cloud that it has caused. The amount of data getting stolen by hackers is higher than ever before. While some of that might simply come down to the fact that more people are taking up hacking as a “career,” the main reason for this increase is due to the faster speed of digital transformation that’s been taking place.
So many companies have made the switch to cloud services in the last few years in order to survive the pandemic that it’s has absolutely overwhelmed the groups that offer cloud-based services. While they’ve been more than happy to take on more clients and expand their services, other areas of their offerings haven’t been getting as much support as they used to. The most prominent, by far, is server security.
We would like to note that these providers haven’t just given up on trying to keep their servers secure. The problem is that online protection is a constantly evolving game that is difficult to keep up with. Hackers continually find new ways to break through firewalls and decode sensitive data, and thanks to the increase of cloud usage across the board, they’re taking that as an opportunity to push harder than ever.
Not all the blame falls on the shoulders of cloud providers, though. Another big reason for this increase is that companies that are new to cloud services don’t know what they need to do to keep their own data safe in this new location. Something as simple as a phishing email could lead to a hacker making off with almost all your data that they then try to sell back to you for an exorbitant amount of money.
What Can You Do About It?
While you obviously need to be able to rely on your cloud provider to help protect your data from external threats, a lot of the burden still falls on you. You have to make sure your staff remains vigilant and knows what kinds of hacker schemes to look out for. You also need to enforce a password policy that encourages your employees to create unique passwords and forces them to change those passwords frequently.
Most importantly, though, you absolutely must back up your data as frequently as possible. That way, if someone manages to break through all your defenses, you won’t be left at their mercy. Granted, they’ll still have your company’s highly classified information, which they could leak to the public or sell off to the highest bidder, but at least you won’t lose it forever.
The last thing you can do to keep your data as safe as possible while still having access to all the benefits that come with using the cloud is to use the services of a company that you can trust. Here at Atmosera, we put a lot of effort into our Microsoft Azure security services. We aspire to be a company that you can trust to keep your data safe, and we make whatever changes are necessary to ensure that it stays that way.
