For the last two decades, business security strategies have largely been focused on the perimeter. Firewalls and email filters have worked well to ensure that hackers and questionable sites have no power to disrupt business activities. Your staff knows how to recognize phishing and they are prompted to change passwords on a regular basis. The problem is that none of these measures protect your company from the dangers of employee cloud adoption.
What seems harmless to your employees can be disastrous for the enterprise network. For instance, imagine you have a new sales rep that used a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution at their old job. In their excitement to be successful, the sales rep clears the cost of the subscription with their sales manager and away they go, credit card in hand and ready to get started.
Sales goals are met, the sales manager is pleased, but before long, dozens of customer files are in the cloud without the protection of your security measures. As more sales reps hear about the success of their colleague with a cloud CRM, they begin to access the solution and enter their own customers’ data. As a result, employee-level cloud adoption takes off and countless data points are now unprotected.
With a perimeter security approach, this type of employee cloud adoption can go on for years without detection by the IT team. It’s easy to imagine it happening in sales, but on every team and in every department, there’s the potential for downloading a cloud finance tool or a scheduling app that seems completely harmless but presents another area of vulnerability for your organization.
One potential way this type of employee cloud adoption can impact a company is the simple availability of the data. Imagine a sales rep moves on to another company, and they discover that their password still works on the CRM. Now they are working for the competitor, but they have access to customer files, marketing plans, and pricing strategies.
The best IT policies won’t prevent employee cloud adoption, and your perimeter approach won’t secure your network in the cloud age. You need a high level of visibility into network traffic, and you need a tripwire that recognizes when a cloud-based solution is interacting with your internal network so that you can determine user access and other security protocols that protect your infrastructure.
Truth Comm provides the network support you need to protect your enterprise. To learn more about the potential for a security breach through employee cloud adoption, contact us for an appointment.