As their businesses grow, companies increasingly embrace new business tools and cloud services in an attempt to make their employees’ working lives more efficient and flexible, as well as reduce expenditures. According to Kaspersky Lab, 73% of with 50-249-staff member companies (SMBs) and 56% of 49-staff member companies (VSBs) use at least one cloud service.
The report indicates that both the smallest companies and those that are going through a rapid growth phase see cloud technologies as an opportunity to handle their business tasks in a more efficient and cost-effective way. Half (50%) of VSBs and 40% of SMBs have employees who regularly work outside of the office and need access to data and applications via the cloud.
The report added that as companies become larger, they experience a growing need for cloud services; 73% of SMBs and 56% of VSBs use at least one cloud service. Among the most popular software as a service (SaaS) tools are email, document storage and collaboration, and finance and accounting services.
However, the report indicate that an active use of clouds has a flipside to it as well. IT infrastructures at organisations are increasingly consolidating more services and applications. As a consequence, 66% of companies having one to 249 staff members experience difficulties around managing these heterogeneous IT infrastructures.
The report concludes that such growing complexity requires SMBs to take a new approach to infrastructure management. The problem, however, is that in-house IT specialists do not always have sufficient expertise to meet this challenge.
Moreover, 14% of companies with 50-249 employees trust IT security management to staff members who are absolutely not IT specialists. This can result in the emergence of real risks to the companies’ cybersecurity.
Kaspersky believes that although small companies are conscious of the problem, they do not have a clear understanding of who bears the responsibility for these assets, since they are being processed via cloud services. It added that companies with up to 49 staff members show an especially disturbing attitude to this problem; nearly two thirds (64%) of VSB respondents are convinced that the provider is responsible for the security of document exchange applications, while 56% of SMB respondents share that opinion.
“All businesses should therefore establish a dedicated role within which the security of cloud platforms, sensitive data, and business processes are kept under control,” said Maxim Frolov, vice president of global sales at Kaspersky Lab.
