The cloud can be a blessing for small business owners fighting through tough economic times. Rather than purchasing costly enterprise software, business owners can save their dollars by accessing powerful computing programs in the cloud, from high-end word processors and project-management tools to spreadsheets and Photoshop alternatives. But, the cloud isn’t perfect, especially when it comes to security issues. Business owners must be aware that their documents, presentations, and marketing materials can be damaged when they’re stored in the cloud.

Password issues

One of the biggest security issues when dealing with the cloud is password protection. This is also one of the primary security issues outside of the cloud.

You ought to carefully select passwords to your projects stored in the cloud. The more complex your passwords are the more difficult they are to guess. A good way to achieve this is to use a combination of numbers and letters in your passwords. Also, you shouldn’t share these passwords with many people.

Hacker alert

A few serious problems that will not soon go away for anyone who uses a computer are hackers, malware, and spyware. As business owners have little control over how secure the cloud is this part of security can be very alarming indeed. Companies like Microsoft and Google must create their own security measures to safeguard the data stored in the cloud.

Common sense protection

Protecting yourself from theft in the cloud is often as simple as applying some common sense practices.

First, sensitive data is probably not the best thing to store in the cloud. If your data is so sensitive that a compromise on its security could spell the collapse of your business, consider saving it on a physical computing system and implement a secure back up process that is more controllable.

Secondly, before giving every employee free access to cloud-stored data, think carefully about which employees actually needs access to that information. People are often careful about protecting their laptops and desktop computers from prying eyes; this attitude should be applied to the cloud as well.