WFH and security of data on cloud

Hitherto, WFH, or work from home, was confined to a small percentage of employees working remotely, but the pandemic has turned this upside down.

One fallout of WFH is its impact on the use of cloud services. According to data shared by Microsoft, its cloud service has seen a high 775% growth in usage during the time when corporates adopted WFH on a large scale. Internet security services provider McAfee carried out an anonymous study of cloud usage by more than 30 million of its cloud users worldwide between January and April 2020. The study revealed that overall enterprise use of cloud services spiked by 50% with manufacturing and financial services companies increasing the most; collaboration services saw an increase of up to 600% in usage with education driving this increase, while government and financial services closely following; and external attacks on cloud accounts increased 630%, with transportation, government and manufacturing verticals most affected.

The study found that cloud traffic from unmanaged devices doubled across all verticals, which presents an increased source of risk stemming from these devices accessing cloud services from outside corporate-managed networks. There is no way to recover sensitive data from an unmanaged device, says the study, so this increased access could result in data loss events if security teams are not controlling cloud access by device type.