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

Password issues

The biggest security issue that company owners face when it comes to cloud computing happens to also be the biggest security issue that users also face when it comes to computing: passwords which are either too easy to guess or shared too freely.

You should always carefully select passwords to your projects stored in the cloud. The more complex your passwords are the more challenging they are to guess. A great way to achieve this is to use a mixture of numbers and letters in your passwords. Also, you shouldn’t share these passwords with lots of people.

Hacker alert

Hackers, malware, and spyware remain serious issues for cloud environments, just as they are problems that business owners face when logging onto their personal computers each day. The thing that makes this particularly scary is that individual business owners have little control over how secure cloud services are. The big names — companies like Microsoft and Google — must provide their own security for the data that business owners store in the cloud.

Common sense protection

As with all computing, companies can protect themselves from the loss or theft of data with some common-sense practices.

First, owners should consider what sort of information they are storing in the cloud. The most sensitive data, data that could damage a company if it is lost or stolen, might not be ideal for cloud storage. Instead, this data may be better stored on a business owner’s individual computing system and dependably backed up.

Secondly, be careful about who is allowed access to the data stored in the cloud. It seems obvious that business owners protect their laptops and desktops with passwords. The same should be applied to the cloud.