The Cloud Turned Upside Down

Up to a year ago, most corporate decision makers were concerned about moving their data to the cloud because of security concerns. However, following a year of record breaking cyber-breaches, both in count and amount of data compromised, those same decision makers are now flocking to the cloud in ever increasing numbers, according to a recently released study by ResearchNow. Law firms should follow their lead.

The 2015 Enterprise Cloud Storage Survey found that about 1/3 of the 300 organizations interviewed had experienced a data breach in 2014 as a result of employees sharing files using a public cloud-based file sharing service (FSS), such as Dropbox or Google Drive. They also found a direct link between FSS usage and BYOD – mobile devices, with very little storage space compared to computers, rely on FSS to store and access data. As a direct result of this finding, 83% of the companies said they have taken steps to implement specific, dedicated private cloud based file sharing solutions for their employees to use.

In addition, one third of those surveyed have moved most of their enterprise resources to the cloud, specifically because the cloud providers can deliver better data security than their own in-house resources could provide.

​In an age when any data store is susceptible to intrusion (as shown by the recent compromise of records for over 4 million former and current U.S. federal employees), data security has become one of the C-Suite’s major discussion points. Cloud providers, whose primary focus is on storing and securing their client’s data, are often much better suited to protecting an organization’s information than the organization itself – including law firms, who are often under the misguided impression that the firm’s security is better than that of a cloud provider.