Securing Your Financial Data in the Cloud

Business-critical back-office applications such as accounting systems, ERPs, and manufacturing platforms are essential for the smooth running of day-to-day company inner workings. They provide key operational support and store important information like customer sales, taxes, COGs, supplier expenses, job costs are more. All of which power a number of functions from accounting to sales and reporting.

Given the critical nature of these back-office applications, it is imperative to ensure they’re online and available to users, and protected from security threats. Most organizations have moved away from self-run datacenter racks or on-premise servers to professional cloud providers, who have superior systems and backup their contracts with service level agreements (SLAs). Read on to discover why secure cloud deployments are the best option for your business critical applications.

Security & Availability

Now more than ever, the information that powers businesses must be secured. With cyber threats increasing, and the realities of ransomware, many organizations are unable to survive after a major data breach. This is underscored in the cyber insurance industry where policies are becoming more difficult, and costly, to acquire. When hosting back-office applications, professional cloud providers have more advanced security systems, networking, and monitoring capabilities than most internal IT teams of small and medium businesses, making it much easier to maintain compliance to many different IT security standards, including those within a cyber insurance policy.

However, securing data against a potential breach isn’t the only priority. Downtime of these back-office applications usually puts a significant cost on the organization. If users are sitting idle or orders can’t be shipped, the hourly and daily costs add up significantly. Professional cloud providers have redundancies built into their network, computing, and storage infrastructure, leading to a higher level of uptime, even if individual components fail.

Additionally, if something were to go wrong with the applications and files hosted in the cloud facility, backups exist so that you can easily restore them with limited disruption or loss of data.

Improved Affordability

In addition to improving the security and availability of your back-office applications, moving to a professional cloud provider often results in cost savings when compared with building and supporting this infrastructure internally. Cloud service providers develop and maintain their own infrastructure at scale, so individual companies share portions of these larger systems. This removes the requirement for large capital investments in servers, security, and storage devices while still getting access to state-of-the-art technology solutions at an affordable price point. Internal teams no longer require specialized skillsets to maintain this complex infrastructure.

Additionally, many cloud platform providers offer scalability options so companies can increase or decrease their usage depending on their needs – saving them money in the long run by only paying for what they use when they need it.

Remain Compliant

Moving your back office applications to a cloud provider often helps achieve data security compliance requirements – without setting up and maintaining complex compliance systems. This is because a large portion of those requirements are supported via the cloud provider and their service level agreement. Many data security standards, data processing agreements, and cyber insurance policies all ask for similar technical requirements to be maintained across different levels of the system. This includes areas of the network, security monitoring, data storage and transmission, access and authorization controls, backup and disaster recovery, and security monitoring. Since cloud provides invest heavily in these areas, you can fast-track achieving and maintaining compliance in many cases.

Summary

For businesses looking to improve the security, availability, and reliability of their back-office applications, moving away from on-premise or generic hosting solutions should be a priority. Professional cloud providers that specialize in hosting financial systems, ERPs, and other back-office applications have made significant investments in their systems that offer higher levels of service at an affordable price. Not only does this allow businesses the advantages of a pay-for-what-you-use model of IT, but it also allows them to maintain compliance to industry data security requirements and those of their cyber insurance.

So if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, contact us for a free assessment of how TruPoint can help with your IT needs.