More and more companies rely on the many Cloud solutions on the market today. However, they forget to protect themselves against data loss in most cases. And the cloud giants won’t back anyone if data is lost.
The popular Microsoft Office suite is an essential everyday tool for everyone – from small one-person businesses to large corporations. Therefore, it is not surprising that more and more organizations, large and small, are using Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, or OneDrive for Business as a core part of their workflows.
Simple And Flexible
Regardless of the provider, cloud solutions offer a flexible, simple, and scalable platform that is often extremely helpful for companies. Because the data is accessible from all departments, companies can quickly scale up or down, easily manage access policies and rest assured that their information is safe and secure in the cloud. But are they?
Cloud providers are only paid for uptime: access to Office 365, for example, wherever and whenever you need it. The latest figures show an uptime of more than 99 percent. While outages do occasionally occur, they are rare and, in most cases, very brief. Nevertheless, companies are still solely responsible for their data.
What Happens In Case Of Breakdowns?
If Microsoft experiences a significant failure or an attack on its data centers, if an employee accidentally deletes important data, or you’re the target of a ransomware attack on cloud data, the major vendors can offer very little if any help. This comes as a surprise to many customers, as it is logical to assume that the providers storing the data will also take care of them if something goes wrong.
The Danger Of Cyber Attacks
According to an IDA survey, two out of three companies are affected by cyber-attacks – and on average, one in eight attempts is successful. This is a worrying development given cybercriminals growing interest in cloud solutions.
The protection offered by the cloud giants is limited: everything deleted in Office 365 ends up in the well-known recycle bin, but only for 30 days. After that, if the files in the recycle bin are manually removed, the data will disappear forever, with disastrous consequences in case of accidental deletions or GDPR. Some of Keep it’s community clients, including teachers, once inadvertently lost several years of preparation material due to this particular limitation.
Microsoft Does Not Promise Complete Security
To come back to the title of this text: Cloud solutions are generally a great invention and have also revolutionized work in this country. However, a problem arises when you blindly trust that your data is safe and secure in the various clouds. In very few cases are they.
Consider all the data generated by Microsoft Teams, which has become very popular, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. If they are not secured, there is a risk that the data generated by the platform, e.g., all shared files, all chats, and dialogues, will disappear forever.
Also, cloud solutions are nothing more than accessible software as part of a service. They also contain bugs and vulnerabilities that, if found, can be exploited by cybercriminals or cause downtime for both the cloud provider and an organization.
Backups Are Key
Decision-makers should therefore review all their contracts with their cloud providers and check their level of security. You should also review your existing backup solution to determine if your current agreement includes regular backups. Experts recommend that one always runs an offsite backup and that ideally, three copies (the so-called 3-2-1 strategy) are implemented, two local backups and one offsite.
There are various ways to create backups, and there’s only one basic rule: even the worst backup solution is better than no backup at all. So when there is no backup copy of an organization’s cloud data, even small initiatives are better than nothing.
Also Read: What A Cloud Migration Can Do?
