When executed correctly, working on the cloud is a great way to store information as a business.  The biggest attraction is that you only pay for what you use; so, in the long run you’ll save a significant amount of money. You can scale your memberships up or down almost instantly. The idea of saving money makes people sign up for cloud computing before they understand what they’re even signing up for. 

The advantages and drawbacks of the infamous cloud have been a hot topic of conversation lately; especially with the recent cloud breaches of large companies like Adobe, Slack, Evernote, and LastPass.  We want to break it down for you and help understand the advantages and disadvantages of the BYOC (bring your own cloud) movement. 

The Pros

1. It’s growing. The cloud computing industry is expected to grow $100 billion between 2015 and 2020. According to Cisco, within the next three years, more than four-fifths of all data center traffic, (83%) will be based in the cloud. There will be more workloads (56%) in the public cloud than in private clouds (44%). 

2. It’s cheap. Most clouds are free to a certain storage point (up to 50 GB free for some companies) and then you’re charged a small fee monthly.  

3. It increases productivity and collaboration. You’re able to work virtually anywhere with an internet connection. Not being able to work on a project because of missing documents is now a thing of the past. The cloud makes it easy to work together on projects. It keeps edits in the same place and you don’t have a whole mess of files per project. Cloud computing also helps streamline relationships with global offices, taking away the time zone problem. 

The Cons 

1. Intellectual property theft.  More than 20% of the data stored in the cloud contain sensitive data that includes intellectual property. Make sure to actually read the terms and conditions where you’re doing your uploading, it can help protect your information and ideas in the long run.  

2. Compliance and regulatory violations. Most companies have some sort of privacy policy that protects your information (think HIPAA at your doctors office). If these agreements are filed in a cloud-based system, your information can 

3. Loss of control. Unfortunately, there are manipulative people out there. A disgruntled current or former employee, a system administrator, a business partner, or a contractor can turn on you and fairly easily steal all of your information on the cloud. This can also be an uneducated employee working on the cloud and accidentally sharing private information publicly. An untrained employee can also permanently delete important purposely or on accident. 

4. Revenue Loss. A recent Target data breach over the holiday season was responsible for a 46% drop in the company’s quarterly profit. Target estimated total costs around $148 million. Of course, Target is a pretty large corporation but the lesson is the same for all businesses, if people don’t trust your data security they will shop elsewhere. 

At Tech Help Boston, we offer Carbonite as a cloud service. Carbonite takes just minutes to install and configure. Once it’s set up, it works in the background, backing up all your files so you never have to worry about doing it on your own. The software will start restoring your files instantly. Even if your computer’s hard drive fails or your laptop is lost or stolen, you can restore your files to any computer in just a few clicks. More than 50% of computer viruses will get past your anti-virus software. With Carbonite, you can restore clean files just as they were before your computer became infected. For more information, check out our website – https://techhelpboston.com/data-protection-and-security/

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