What Do Cloud Services Provide to Help With Privacy and Security Concerns?

In the world of cybersecurity, there's a saying: it's not if they hack you, but when. With cyber attacks occurring every 39 seconds, it's just a matter of time.

The vast majority of businesses have moved some or all of their operations to the cloud. This provides amazing benefits to productivity and accessibility, but comes with the aforementioned risks as well. If you fail to shore up your defenses, you could very well become the next victim.

Cloud services are your friend when it comes to company security. What do cloud services provide to help with privacy and security concerns?

Follow along as we take a look at the methods and tools cloud services put into play to protect your business security.

What Do Cloud Services Provide to Help With Privacy and Security Concerns?

Think of cloud services as your office in the cloud. This is the infrastructure that allows your employees-and customers-to interact seamlessly and handle important data. It involves software, security protocols, and privileges for managing it all effectively.

Let's look at specific things that cloud services do to ensure data privacy and security.

Use Military-Grade Encryption

Encryption is all around us, and yet many don't realize how vital it is to data security. In essence, encryption involves scrambling data to make it unreadable. Only those with the proper cryptographic keys can reassemble it into working information.

You use encryption everywhere. It secures your Apple iMessages, passwords in your password manager, and your cloud storage-and so much more.

How Encryption Protects You

Encryption is virtually uncrackable. Until we build viable quantum computers, it would take trillions of years to break modern encryption standards.

Needless to say, encryption secures your data from unauthorized, prying eyes. It allows you to safely transmit data from server to server across the globe.

Your cloud services use modern standards like AES-128 and AES256. They have been vetted by security professionals the world over. Everything from company files to project data can be secured by these protocols.

Make Frequent Backups

Backups are not optional in the cyber world. Security experts recommend storing data in at least three different places. Preferably, one of those locations should be offline and air-gapped.

Backups have become even more essential in the wake of ransomware attacks. A ransomware attack is when a hacker infiltrates your system and then encrypts your data. Once it's utterly inaccessible to you, they demand a steep ransom in order to decrypt it.

The reason ransomware attacks are so effective is because most of the victims don't have any back ups. They have no choice but to pay the ransom-which is often prohibitively expensive. You can avoid all of this nonsense by keeping backups.

The Value of Regular Backups

It's critical that all businesses perform regular backups on a semi-frequent schedule. Daily, weekly, monthly, it depends on your business.

If you lose data, you can load it right back up and get back to work. Avoid the horrendous damage to profits and productivity when data loss leaves your company dead in the water.

Use VPNs

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) creates an encrypted and secure connection between you and your Internet destination. Imagine the internet is a network of roads and highways. In this analogy, VPN would be your own private, guarded tunnel.

Most internet traffic is encrypted these days thanks to HTTPS. However, many businesses are running operations across the map. They may have remote workers in other cities, states, or even countries.

This puts data in transit at great risk. Hackers often look for weak endpoints such as unsecured employee PCs. This way, they can compromise vital data without penetrating your system.

How VPNs Keep Data Safe in Transit

VPNs are a must for securing company data. By using a company VPN, all traffic on authorized devices must tunnel through the VPN. Otherwise, it gets rejected.

As a result, your spread-out workforce retains very high security standards. Business privacy and security is strong regardless of the distance.

Shield Against Malware

Malware continues to be-and always will be-a threat to your system. All it takes is a tiny bundle of malicious code to ruin a sophisticated security system. The legendary Stuxnet brought an Iranian uranium enrichment plant to its knees and weighed only half a megabyte in size.

Malware is vicious, persistent, and ever-evolving. To increase security, cloud services must employ a proactive approach. Nothing less will do.

How Cloud Services Tackle Malware

There are a number of ways to protect against malware.

First, cloud services make sure everything stays up-to-date. Updates include security patches that origin companies push out to block off exploits. Waiting too long to perform updates puts you in a vulnerable position.

Second, cloud services use cutting-edge antivirus software. It runs in the background, serving as a "bouncer" to monitor unseen activities and connections. It can quarantine potentially infected files and automatically handle security threats.

Security Education

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Hackers know that humans are far more vulnerable than systems. For this reason, they use social engineering techniques on humans rather than attacking the systems they have access to.

The easiest way to do this is with phishing emails. A seemingly authoritative email asks an unwitting employee to share their password. Believing them to be trustworthy, the employee complies-to their great detriment.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Poor security practices include having bad passwords, failing to use two-factor authentication, and more.

Employee Education

Cloud services can help employees maintain better security practices. For example, they could require stronger passwords by default to access information. They can provide secure password managers for employees to store their credentials.

Short of providing training, cloud services can account for the weaknesses posed by ignorant employees.

Get Cloud Services With Eagle Point Technology

What do cloud services provide to help with privacy and security concerns? They give you military-grade encryption, regular backups, VPNs, and more. Importantly, they help your employees improve their security practices for a secure, private online workplace.

Eagle Point Tech is your go-to source for IT services of all kinds. Take a look at our cloud services and bulk up your security.