Prevent Misuse by Managing Employee Cloud Access

By Michael Brown 1

As important as it is for managed service providers (MSPs) to protect your clients from external threats, it can be just as important to protect organizations from themselves. By managing security and access in cloud data storage and cloud-based file sharing, MSPs can help to prevent employee misuse within an organization.

Over the past couple years, the news all around the world has been littered with the narratives of major security breaches from outside hackers. As organizations (and MSPs) rush to patch up any openings in their security protection against the external invaders, they better be just as cognizant of the potential threats that can compromise their data from inside their own walls.

“Misuse of employee credentials and improper access controls top the list of concerns over public cloud security,” says a recent report from eWeek, commenting on a survey of more than a thousand IT and IT security practitioners conducted by cloud access security broker Bitglass. “Even with the major breaches of last year, dominant security concerns involve misuse of employee credentials and improper access control, not malware and hacking.”

According to the Bitglass report, the top three security issues are unauthorized account access (63 percent), hijacking of accounts (61 percent), and malicious insiders (43 percent).  In many instances, these findings represent a game changer in the plan of attack for preventing breaches of security.

“Organizations need to understand that data protection in the public cloud is a shared responsibility between app vendors and the enterprise,” says Rich Campagna, vice president of products at Bitglass.

Campagna’s comments highlight the importance for MSPs to step up and help do the same things that his company attempts to achieve, to “fill the security gaps that app vendors don’t cover.”

Furthermore, MSPs need to be aware that their constituents may very well be losing faith in the cloud.  Thirty-six percent of survey respondents believed that even major cloud applications were less secure than their on-premise applications. This was the same reason that many of them cited as to why they were yet resistant to the widespread adoption of cloud services.

The good news is that the method for prevention in these instances is pretty clear: MSPs need to do more to manage employee access to cloud-based services.  Only with access control measures taking place can organizations voice a legitimate complaint about employee misuse in the cloud.

“Organizations must allow employees to use the devices and applications of their choosing, while building controls on top of cloud applications that limit access to sensitive data, prohibit suspicious activity, and protect data anywhere, even after it has been downloaded to personal mobile devices,” says Campagna.

Despite the concern over internal breaches of information, 38 percent of enterprises responded that they still store intellectual property in the cloud, with another 31 percent responding that they use the cloud to store customer data. If MSPs would like to see these numbers remain intact – and, hopefully, grow larger – it’s important to place more of an emphasis on employee access control.