Moving into the cloud is a daunting prospect for many businesses; even more so when dealing with sensitive financial information. One of the main reasons for this seems to be fear around security and increased risk.
Years ago, transitioning from traditional paper practices to IT solutions raised many of the same fears and yet, look at the advantages it provided: flagging and alerts of discrepancies, from customer payments lagging to sudden increases in expenditure or exceeding budgets; simplifying information to be understood by anyone leaving less place to hide fraud; and real-time access to information.
If fear is holding you back, you should know that one of the greatest benefits of cloud is handing some of your risk over to experts who are better able to protect your data than you are.
Cost is always a priority, so let’s look at investment risk. With cloud, there is no large upfront cost, no need for internal specialists or maintenance, and most solutions are easily scalable, allowing you to add or remove users as needed. Cloud also provides access to unlimited storage at a much lower cost than extending your own hardware would.
When you own the infrastructure, it is your responsibility to get professionals to continually test and fix any security risks. Cloud providers employ security specialists; providing the highest level of service at no extra cost and your software is automatically updated and secure.
On the topic of automatic updates – software integrations, customisations, fixes and even additional products and features can be implemented without any disruption to your business. Having everything up to date decreases all your risks, and this automation also minimises the need for staff to do unapproved updates and downloads which open your systems to potential risk through viruses and malware.
The data centres cloud providers use, have backups in place to prevent the loss of your data, ensuring your ability to recover it should any disaster hit – natural or otherwise. In addition to this, the physical security at a data centre far surpasses that which the average business could afford. So you are gaining a physical safety bonus as well.
Cloud services have many benefits, including those that will support your company’s risk management planning, so don’t let fear cloud your judgment. With your provider covering so much of your risk, it frees you up to spend your time on developing and growing your business.