Do you really know where your data is these days?

At least 6 of Deloitte clients affected by a high-profile cyber-attack. US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suffers a system breach. 143 million US consumers affected in the Equifax breach. With such resonant cyber-attacks taking place within a single month, it becomes clear that anyone can be affected by cybercriminals. But how do you even start with securing your data? What are the best practices to keep your data fully safe in the cloud?  

One of the easiest and most important thing for businesses is to be aware of where their data is stored these days so that they can proactively identify if any of the data may be at risk of a breach.

These days, data is being stored in multiple cloud locations and applications in addition to storage devices in business. Companies are adopting cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. and online software services for all kind of business processes. This has led to vast fragmentation of company data, and often managers have no idea where all the data may be.

For example, a confidential financial report for the company may get stored in a cloud storage because devices are automatically synching with cloud or a sensitive business conversation may happen in cloud-based messaging services such as Slack. While cloud companies have all the good intentions to keep their customer data safe, they are also the prime target because hackers have better ROI in targeting such services where they can potentially get access to data for millions of subscribers.

So, what should a business do?

While they will continue to adopt cloud services and their data will end up in many, many locations, they can use some search and data organization tools that can show them what data exists in these services. Using full-text search capabilities in products such as QuikFynd (https://www.quikfynd.com/enterprise), they can then very quickly find out if any of this information is a potential risk to the company if breached. Individuals can use these capabilities by deploying QuikFynd on their desktop and best thing is that 30-day trial is available for free (https://www.quikfynd.com/desktop). You can't protect something if you don't even know where it is. And more importantly, you won't even know if it is stolen. So, companies looking to protect their business data need to take steps at least to be aware of where all their information is.