Building a Data Protection Plan That Works

Who is responsible for protecting your data in the cloud? Are cloud providers the ones who need to be accountable, or is it the data owners? The effectiveness of data protection strategies rely on being able to answer this question.

First and foremost, cloud providers are responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs their services. And while some providers offer tools that can add to your data protection plan, they aren’t responsible for protecting your data.

Unfortunately, a high percentage of people believe it’s the service provider’s responsibility to protect data and manage security applications. If they think it’s on someone else to protect their data, they probably aren’t doing enough on their end to ensure their data will be safe from cyber thieves.

Protecting Your Data

Your duty as a customer of cloud-based computing services is: to manage your encryption methods and all configurations, monitor traffic and users as they access specific data, and take care of patches and flag suspicious activity. None of this is the provider’s responsibility – it all falls on your IT personnel or security team.

Just because the data is in the cloud doesn’t mean you should treat it any differently than data that resides on your in-house servers. The sooner you can educate everyone with access to your system about being accountable, the faster you’ll reduce your risk of being compromised.

Reducing Risk

With a security team in place, you should be able to run everything by them to ensure you’re not doing something that could potentially put your data protection plan at risk. For example, don’t start loading numerous applications and gigabytes of data to the cloud without running it by the security team. You can’t expect everybody to understand all the complexities involved in using the cloud, but that’s what the security team is there for.

Construct protection policies, and get everyone up to speed on them. Once they’re educated, hold people accountable for following these policies. Maybe you’ll establish a rule that all sensitive data and applications will remain on premise, at which point you’ll need to define what “sensitive” actually means. This should all be written into your data protection plan so it’s plain for everyone to see.

Organizations that are limited on the number of IT staff, or the quality of existing IT personnel,  do themselves a great service by outsourcing their data protection solutions to professionals. At One Connect, we know it can be overwhelming to put together a plan that will protect your data and keep your business running unimpeded – especially given the number of attacks that occur every minute today.

One Connect will help you set up a custom cyber security plan that fits all of your needs. We’re saving customers a lot of money and providing the much-needed assurance that their data will be as safe as possible, so contact us, and let’s talk about how we’ll approach your plan.