How employees are putting their business at risk

Does your company allow its employees to use personal devices for work activities? A study has shown that over 90% of workers use personal devices to store, share and access business documents, however this poses as a high threat for businesses.

Companies are likely to face data security breaches due to employees being reliant on computing devices and cloud services to store and access business documentation. Around 915 of workers use their personal devices to access and store work documents, whereas 43% use personal cloud services for the same purpose. Companies have been known to store business documentation using technologies such as SharePoint, which was designed to keep confidential content locked inside an organisation. However, employees require easier ways to access what they need from any location and on any device.

This therefore results in a free-for-all use of cloud services, smartphones, USB’s and external hard drives, which causes external threats to the company if some information is placed in the wrong hands. Due to employees wanting to be able to work from any location and using any device, this lowers the security of any company. Although, these statistics show how bring your own device (BYOD) is on the increase within businesses. BYOD is all well and good if businesses are capable of maintaining their business security, but many small and medium businesses are still struggling with keeping the information secure.

Employees may not be fully aware but they are exposing their company’s confidentiality to the threat of cyber criminals. To overcome these security threats, the government has pledged to invest £7.5m to train the next generation of IT security experts. This is one of the defences being introduced to improve cyber defences for all businesses.

The results from one survey suggested that employees do not actually consider the security threats when downloading or uploading data. However, a quarter of these workers do not know how to protect data when using email, a company PC or their smartphone.

Does your business require more secure strategies to be put in place?

Speak to our team today!

Posted: 18/09/2013