Employees Are Putting Businesses At Risk With Poor Cloud Security Practices

The cloud is posing a considerable security risk to businesses thanks to employees who are using cloud solutions which aren't properly secured for the enterprise.

This conclusion has been drawn by cloud security experts Skyhigh Networks, which conducted a study on cloud adoption and user behaviour, the headline finding of which was that only 9 per cent of the 2,105 cloud services being used by over a million EU users had enterprise-appropriate security precautions in place. Less than one in ten, in other words, which is a troublingly low figure indeed.

A vast majority of those put under the microscope by the research – 72 per cent of them – were also storing data in the States, possibly in breach of EU data laws.

Skyhigh Networks notes that the truth is that these users just don't realise that they're in the wrong, and many simply don't know about the dangers of using consumer cloud services in the workplace. Businesses need to better address these issues by educating their staff, the security firm asserted.

Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh Networks, told Cloud Pro: "Employees don't realise they are doing anything wrong – in many cases they are just trying to get their work done."

Skyhigh has also been banging the drum about cloud providers and security in the wake of the Heartbleed revelations this week – 24 hours after the flaw was widely publicised, 368 cloud providers hadn't patched up to protect themselves from the vulnerability, including some of the leading cloud storage and backup solutions.

For more on cloud security, see our article on the 5 biggest cloud security concerns explained.