Half of all workers in the UK say they wouldn’t store personal and commercial information in the Cloud for security reasons, according to a new report.
Cloud security was highlighted as the biggest concern for businesses by a survey commissioned by the automated accounts payable and document management software specialist, Invu.
Data back-up and the recovery of lost data was the second biggest concern, cited by 37 per cent.
This was followed by the risk of corruption of data stored on the Cloud, fear over control of access to it, the location of the data and inappropriate or erroneous data sharing if it.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was older members of the workforce who were more suspicious – 54 per cent aged between 35 and 64 said security is their biggest concern. The figure rose to 61 per cent for those over 65.
Even third-party cloud service providers are struggling to convince businesses on the issue of security. The report was called Risky business – analysing the state of UK business processes.
Previous research conducted by IS Decisions found that 63 per cent of SMEs thought cloud providers should do more to protect data.
Ian Smith, general manager and finance director at Invu, said: “This survey exposes a guilty secret of many organisations: the physical offsite storage of confidential and sensitive data in paper form. The security requirements here are not under as much media scrutiny as the cloud or indeed company networks. However, out of sight is not entirely out of mind as the recent ICO fine of London pharmacy Doorstep Dispensaree Ltd illustrates.
“The power of the cloud to process and store data comes with some risk. With up to 97 per cent of security incidents being attributed to human error, fear grows with the knowledge that one poorly chosen mouse click can have painful consequences. Given the power of the cloud, isn’t it time that software design caught up and addressed these human frailties?”
The survey involved 1000 Finance workers in the UK. The interviews were conducted online by Sapio Research in September 2019 using an email invitation and an online survey.
