Five Ways Small and Medium Businesses Can Keep Data Safer and Save Money

Small and medium-sized businesses are committed to protecting the security of their company and customer data, often at great cost. Keeping data safer and saving money while doing it is challenging with traditional IT models. Expert staff is required to constantly monitor traffic, regularly update software and hardware with the latest patches, and comply with the latest standards for data privacy. There’s also the day-to-day tasks of managing user access and enforcing network and application security. To do it well, it may feel like you need a team of IT experts and a budget without limits. You’re not alone—many businesses of your size face the same constraints.

The great data protection equalizer

You may have heard that the cloud is a great equalizer that provides businesses of all sizes with immediate access to the latest technologies to store and protect critical data. Managing security often requires tradeoffs with other important projects, but the cloud provides a path to achieve a reliable security posture without the tradeoffs of traditional approaches.

Your goal is to safeguard your operating environment as well as customer and corporate data without hits to performance, cost, or architecture. With cloud-based security, your business inherits strong security and compliance controls and the ability to easily scale. Automation enables efficiencies that help improve your protection and save time, and trusted security partners and solutions enable you to continuously improve with new and innovative security features.

With the cloud as a central part of your security strategy, consider the following five ways cloud services support data protection and data privacy:

1. Better protect data with automated data detection and encryption that continuously monitors and protects your data moving through and across workloads.
2. Improve data privacy with a comprehensive view of privacy status and continuous monitoring using automated compliance checks. Timely updates help you meet security and compliance standards for your specific region and industry.
3. Detect issues using the latest technologies, including integrated anomaly detection and machine learning to detect and stop unauthorized traffic and prevent it from becoming a business-impacting event.
4. Manage user identity, access policies, and entitlements as well as business governance. The cloud easily scales to support user authentication, authorization, and single sign-on.
5. Enforce fine-grained security policy at network control points across your organization. Cloud services can also scan for known software issues, even those introduced unintentionally during development and deployment.

Ask yourself if your current security approach allows you to:

• Perform regular scans on hardware and software and immediately install patches/updates as issues are identified.
• Perform daily backups of files and databases, operating systems, applications, configurations, virtual machines, hosts and management consoles, cloud-hosted infrastructure, and on-device data.
• Follow data compliance and data privacy regulations based on your industry and/or geography.
• Quickly identify and detect security alerts and determine the root cause with clear prioritization to help guide your response.

If your business struggles to meet any of these necessary security practices, or if the growth in your business has you concerned about scaling your security capabilities for the future, it’s time to consider how the cloud can help.

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Reliable, resilient, and affordable cloud solutions

Did you know the cloud not only reduces the complexity of securing and protecting your data, but it can also save you money? AWS saved companies 31 percent on average, while reliably storing and backing up all their business data. An extensive investment in global availability zones and redundant networks, storage, and compute help ensure that you always have access to your critical data and applications. In addition, AWS brings experience and frameworks to ensure business continuity, including dedicated teams and partners that can provide on-demand expertise and support.

AWS security infrastructure is built to satisfy the highest data privacy and security requirements of the world’s leading financial, educational, and governmental institutions that rely on it, ensuring you have the same level of security they do. AWS customers report on average 43% fewer monthly security incidents, and a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime. Because AWS security solutions are deeply integrated, a high level of automation is possible, enabling you to reduce human configuration errors and give your team more time to focus on other work critical to your business.

The essentials of a smart cloud security strategy

Securing your data in the cloud is smart business, and it doesn’t have to be costly or at the expense of other business initiatives. Learn more about the essentials of a cloud security strategy.