New research carried out in the U.S. has revealed that the majority of businesses who store credit card data using cloud storage are not doing so securely.
Information Management reported today that research by the company reviews aggregator Clutch found that over 60% of small businesses that use cloud storage for customer credit card and banking information were not storing this data securely.
Clutch’s research polled the IT decision-makers at 300 small businesses in the U.S. who currently use cloud storage.
In addition, the results showed that 54% of companies that store medical data do not do so securely.
By not storing this data securely, the businesses are breaching industry regulations on data storage.
In the U.S., this can lead to fines of millions of dollars and of course huge damage to a company’s reputation.
However, just as important – in the U.S. and everywhere else – is the need to protect customers’ sensitive financial information.
Being unable to reassure customers that their credit card and other personal information will be safe may lead to a downturn in business as customers will not feel confident giving you their data.
More than simply comprising customers’ privacy, having this kind of data unsecured leaves them at financial risk through the danger of fraud.
In the UK, with the new General Data Protection Regulation incoming, the need to ensure your cloud storage is secure and follows industry guidelines is also more important than ever.
Data breaches of unsecured cloud storage have featured heavily in the news recently. Just yesterday it was revealed that data on 123 million households in the U.S. was leaked due to a breach of an Amazon Web Services storage bucket used by a marketing company.
According to the security researcher who discovered the breach, the data included 248 fields of information for each household, meaning that “billions of personally identifying details and data points about virtually every American household” were made visible.
Safe Data Storage provide secure, fully-managed cloud backup services with extensive technical support. Data is encrypted and stored in two data centres, both based in the UK.
