Greater cloud education and awareness of cyberthreats needed in the UK, claim industry authorities

Ahead of asking the range of experts for their opinions, Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender, commented on the rising adoption of the cloud among businesses amid growing concerns about data security. “Years ago, firms were used to having their own data centres and keeping control of information. With cloud computing, businesses are uncertain about who has ultimate control of the management of this data and how secure this information is. With more education, however, SMEs will see that this problem is quite easy to solve.”

Désiré Athow, industry journalist, outlined some of the key challenges that organisations face in terms of cloud migration: “To put it bluntly, an SME has other things to take care of other than just learning theories behind cloud computing. They don’t necessarily understand how much of a transition it may be from their current system to a cloud-based one. There needs to be more focused education around not only what cloud means but also the subsets of cloud computing.”

Addressing key cyberthreats, Richard Hijlkema, Finance & ICT Manager at Gemeente Echt - Susteren, pointed to encryption and firewalls as key security methods and stated, “Attacks are increasing [and] it’s not if but when.” Erivaldo Guimaraes, Researcher at London South Bank University, added, “As the technology is improving, also the [cyber]attack methods and options are improving, so…they have more security but they may also have more fails than ever before.”

The interview feedback also addressed the benefits of storing data via the cloud, with Bitdefender’s Chief Technology Officer, Bogdan Dumitru, noting, “Moving to the cloud means that you do not have to frequently update or patch the solution and doing all of the IT work that you used to do in your IT department or data centre.”
Peter Warren, investigative journalist and author of Cyber Alert, notes that with cloud “you can have your information anywhere” and adds, “small businesses particularly don’t actually want to know too much about technology. They are increasingly, because of cost, looking to outsource that dependence and they want to outsource it on people they can trust.”

The expert insight follows reports that cloud computing can help businesses reduce operating costs, with online collaborative software improving efficiency. However, despite rising levels of cloud adoption, a third of firms have experienced unauthorised access to their cloud systems according to a recent survey.

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“Online threats to small and medium businesses have never been so prevalent, or so complex,” said Catalin Cosoi, Bitdefender’s Chief Security Strategist. “Rather than piling on the difficulty, our answer is to cut through the clutter and offer a simple, effective solution that can be deployed with complete efficiency by almost anybody working within an office environment.”