Eighty percent of companies stop their staff from using cloud-based file sharing services because of security fears, claims data governance software vendor Varonis.
A report by the vendor highlights the struggle firms face when trying to balance the use of these services with their fears about data loss.
Seventy per cent of respondents said they would like to use services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, if the safeguards surrounding them were as robust as internal tools.
David Gibson, vice president of strategy at Varonis, said the growth of data and remote working means more people are using these services.
“For remote employees, those services are just so much easier to use – you don’t have to be connected to the corporate network, [and] the synchronisation happens automatically with all your devices,” Gibson told Cloud Pro.
“All of a sudden, organisations are faced with a user population that is starting to create and store and keep their data outside of the company. This is a huge issue, because if you lose your data you are, in some ways, losing your organisation.”
Gibson said banning the use of file sharing services would not work.
“It is not going to work in the long term because, if organisations cannot deliver the same quality of service that people can get for free, eventually [they] will start to question whether they want that service at all,” he explained.
“In other words, the way forward has to be that internal IT organisations have to be able to offer the same quality of service that people can get for free in order to compete.”
