The lack of importance businesses, including financial planning practices, have placed on securing company documents and clients’ financial records is a growing concern as many do not have a strategy in place or are using the wrong provider, according to an IT expert.
“The knowledge level is fairly limited. People automatically assume that it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and that somebody else is taking care of it,” I Know IT chief executive James Vickery said.
“There needs to be a clear strategy as to how company data is stored. It’s about having a clear company mandate for that.
“This concern applied to companies before the arrival of cloud [Computing] – where and how company documents and records are stored such as a shared drive.”
Vickery said mobility is affecting every industry globally due to the influx of new mobile devices and tablets.
“It’s creating a distribution of where data is stored,” he said.
“Some of the smaller financial planning companies that we’ve worked with don’t have a centralised server system so they’re using tools like DropBox to store data and that could potentially have some security risks in the future.
“There’s not really a lot of onus on free services to provide the utmost security to their customers and there’s no real liability in those cases.”
Vickery said while the cloud is easy to use, he believes the question of data protection isn’t at the top of mind for a lot of business owners due to a lack of education.
“If you put your data on a system, there’s still a need for a backup [and] carefully checking with the provider what their backup methods are.”
Once a strategy is in place, choosing the right provider is the next step but businesses must be certain that the provider is reputable enough and that they take off-site backups of the system, Vickery adds.
“Another consideration is whether there are any legal restrictions as to where data is stored. For example, in the health industry you’re not allowed to store data in the cloud if the cloud resides in Singapore, the United States and so forth.”
