WINTER 2016

8 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK
Joe Dysart
Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks,
California. A journalist for 20 years, his articles have appeared in more than 40
publications, including The New York Times and The Financial Times of London.
During the past decade, his work has focused exclusively on ecommerce.
Telephone: 631-256-6602; web: www.joedysart.com; email: joe@joedysart.com.
ROGUE CLOUD USE: VULNERABILITY AWAITING
PLUNDER FOR FASTENER DISTRIBUTORS
Rogue employees at fastener distributors working with
sensitive company data in public cloud services are regularly
wreaking havoc at workplaces.
They're triggering the loss of
company secrets, the defacement of
company Web sites and the loss of
control over those cloud accounts to
competitors and hackers, according to
Web security experts.
And they're engendering an overall
state of unease among many IT
directors, who are watching all the
unauthorized use unfold, but are often
unable to fully get the message to
employees that such unauthorized
uses can put a fastener distributor or
other company at grave risk.
“Enterprise IT is rapidly losing
control of corporate data,” says Andres
Rodriguez, CEO, Nasuni, a data
storage company. “It’s a risky
proposition that IT needs to be in front
of, and not behind.”
Security pros say the problem is
rampant at fastener distributors and
across corporate America, where
employees regularly flaunt company
policies against the use of public cloud
services like DropBox, Google Docs
and Microsoft Office 365.
Those services, which are often
very inexpensive and extremely powerful, are very hard to
resist for today’s on-the-move employee, who is often
ABOVE: IPHONES USED AT THE WORKPLACE ARE
OFTEN NOT SECURED FOR COMPANY USE.
BELOW: PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES LIKE
DROPBOX OFTEN LEAVE SENSITIVE COMPANY
DATA VULNERABLE, ACCORDING TO MANY
SECURITY PROS.
juggling an iPhone in one hand a tablet in the other, and
lurching for a latte at Starbucks.
But as no matter how tempting,
those public cloud services are
inherently insecure, say security pros.
At best, the public cloud only offers
‘consumer grade’ security – a watered
down version of the ‘enterprise grade’
security many corporations must
maintain to meet compliance
regulations, according to Nimmy
Reichenberg, vice president of
marketing and business development,
AlgoSec, a computer security firm.
The result? More than 25% of
companies and organizations recently
surveyed by computer security firm
Symantec said they had lost control
over one or more their public cloud
accounts, saw their Web sites defaced
or experienced the theft of goods or
services due to security breaches in
the public cloud.
Moreover, 40% of the 3,236
organization surveyed said they had
suffered exposure of confidential
company information stored in public
cloud accounts, according to
Symantec's survey.
And more than 75% of those
organizations surveyed by Symantec
said that their employees had shared or stored critical
company data in public cloud services.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLE
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