12-27-21 | Blog Post
The holiday season may be the most wonderful time of the year for revenue boosts, however, it is also the most wonderful time of the year for hackers, credit card theft and company data breaches.
It’s estimated that total U.S. retail sales will climb 3.8 percent to $1.008 trillion, making this year the first-ever trillion-dollar holiday shopping season. Although retailers are the first victims who come to mind, any business with an online presence is at risk, which makes cybersecurity a must-have for all industries. Here are six reasons to use cloud solutions during the holidays.
Whether it’s private financial records, corporate credit cards in your system or confidential employee information, cloud security gives business owners a 99.99% data protection guarantee with full compliance through HIPPA, PCI-DSS and SOC. Services like Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) will safeguard your data against all types of online threats and ensure fast and secure recovery should you face unplanned downtime, a cyberattack, or any other outage.
Accidents happen and detecting cybercrimes is not always cut and dry this time of year. Malicious behaviors could be disguised as innocent emails and be displayed on many different platforms.
Whether it’s a form of holiday malvertising with a fake link, a company email look-a-like or a Facebook message from an impostor, cloud security solutions, like email security, can protect businesses in the event of employees accidentally falling for these traps. Additionally, employers should consider educating employees to recognize cyberattacks and other malicious activity with cybersecurity training.
No matter the industry, cloud security is a must in protecting your customers and their trust in your business. Retailers wouldn’t complete a transaction if a customer’s credit card wasn’t secured in the system, just like a healthcare provider wouldn’t ask for a patient’s health history if the network wasn’t safe.
However, there is always wiggle room for a hacker, especially if these businesses aren’t utilizing cloud security. Implementing cybersecurity practices for your business go beyond protecting your company. It also ensures the safety of your customers’ data, endpoints, network and more. Customer protection through the cloud validates their loyalty to your business before, during and after the holidays.
No matter what cloud solution you choose, whether public, hybrid or private, Security as a Service (SECaaS), or cloud security, is any company’s saving grace during the holidays. With 24x7x365 monitoring and management, and data storage in multiple locations, there’s no need for IT teams to manually maintain company networks and servers. Instead, companies can sleep well at night knowing their cloud provider is protecting their business—increasing efficiency for internal teams and relieving stress at the same time.
Hyper growth during the holiday season tends to lead to an increase in data, which means a need for more storage. Whether a small business or a large corporation, companies can invest in scalable cloud solutions that can easily grow or shrink as your needs shift throughout the year.
Just like with extra storage space, cloud services give businesses the leisure to pay for what works best for their budgets and business models. For example, rather than hybrid and private cloud solutions that many large corporations need, smaller to mid-sized businesses might choose a public cloud, because it’s priced at a lower cost, yet effective for their business size.
Cloud computing is also one of the smartest company investments from a disaster recovery standpoint. Earlier in 2019, the City of Baltimore suffered a severe cyberattack, paying $10 million in recovery efforts and $8.2 million in damages for a grand total of $18.2 million of ransomware. The most staggering part is that it could all have been prevented through a cloud security investment.
Cyberattacks can happen to anyone. To avoid suffering one, be proactive and use cloud security so you can be at ease and enjoy the holiday season with your loved ones.
