Cloud security has been all the rage for the last few years and there’s no sign of letting up. By 2020, 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud with 41% of them seen to be running on public cloud platforms.

However, with the cloud’s increasing popularity, organizations become more concerned on security, followed by their concerns on governance and compliance, experience, and privacy. In McAfee’s latest Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, 21% of files of over 30 million users were found out to contain sensitive information. Moreover, on average, organizations experience 12.2 compromised account threats each month.

With these numbers that may be possible to increase in the upcoming years, what do organizations need to do? Here’s a list of the important cloud data security practices to follow.

What Are the Most Essential Cloud Data Security Practices?

Firms of all sizes need to implement security protocols to follow in order to avoid the tremendous costs of attacks like a data breach. Cybercrime is becoming incredibly advanced and makes it impossible to do business without having extensive security practices in place. Here’s what businesses should do.

1. User Permissions and Access Management

One of the most essential security practices is to enforce the application of user permissions. Firms with sensitive information need to have the IT security expertise to separate users in the company system and keep sensitive information secure by giving authorized users login credentials.

There have been extensive innovations in user permissions, including the application of biometric identification instead of logging in a username and password on a keyboard.

2. Strong Encryption

An essential component of any cloud data security plan is incorporated encryption. In fact, encryption should play a fairly central role in cloud data security practices.

Cloud encryption best practices include:

• Identifying the data that needs encryption
• Knowing where the particular data should be deployed
• Choosing the best cloud provider that offers the right encryption for the data
• Separating encryption keys from the encrypted data and having key backups

3.  Embrace Automation

Cloud security can be automated and makes it easier for organizations to keep cloud systems routinely updated with less manual intervention.

Here are some cloud security tasks that can be automated:

• Generating alerts for unauthorized activities like suspicious installments
• Adding or removing users on productions systems
• Troubleshooting
• Changing file permissions and sending notifications

4. Embrace Geo-Fencing

With geo-fencing, firms can use IP addresses and geolocation information as a framework for a geographic boundary that can be used to identify suspicious users.

5. Take Advantage of Data-aware Filtering

Administrators can use data-aware filtering to monitor who accessed what and when. Organizations can use this to watch for patterns or specific events that will trigger an action, making it a highly proactive tool.

6. Getting Help from Managed IT Service Providers

Critical management tasks such as ensuring cloud data security can be done easier with the help of managed IT service providers. These providers are devoted to security and are always updated on the latest tools and regulatory requirements for any industry and any country to guarantee protection against threats and data misuse.

What’s also great about managed IT service providers, besides taking a huge workload off an organization’s shoulders, is their experience in disaster recovery. They offer frequent data replication and failover locations for easier recovery if ever the worse happens.

What GeekTek Can Do for Your Industry

GeekTek provides managed IT services to today’s leading industries such as retail, manufacturing, construction, and cannabis. Some of their services include, but are not limited to:

• System audits
• Security systems
• System lockdowns, and constant access to data
• Cybersecurity
• All devices are encrypted
• Monitoring security 24/7
• Backing up of data
• Keeping multiple locations safe
• Access constantly
• Intruder prevention and detection

Get the Best in IT Security with GeekTek’s Managed IT Services

When it comes to implementing cloud data security practices, firms need a company they can trust. Managed IT services are one of the best tools available for facilitating high-grade security features at an affordable cost. Trusted leaders like GeekTek can provide superior cloud protection and lets organizations focus on more important work.

Find the best in cloud data protection. Choose GeekTek. Call today.