How to combat insider threats as organisations increasingly rely on cloud computing to telecommunicate

Cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, and others, have recently acknowledged that they are struggling to deal with a spike in remote tools usage.

As organisations hastily adapt for remote working, they might fail to ensure adequate data security. In particular, cloud usage increases the risk of insider threats as 53% of organisations believe detecting insider attacks is significantly harder in the cloud than on-premises, according to a recent report. Therefore, it has never been as important as it is today for organisations to implement proper measures to mitigate the insider threat to protect data in the cloud.

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Why do remote workers pose a threat to cloud security?

Firstly, remote employees use cloud applications to exchange data, including sensitive data, and could misplace it in insecure locations which could lead to a compliance violation. For example, sharing sensitive data via Microsoft Teams – an increasingly popular application for telecommunication – will result in data spreading across SharePoint Online storage with a high risk of unauthorised access. In fact, 39% of the UK respondents to our recent survey are sure that employees in their organisations share sensitive data via cloud applications outside of IT’s control.

Secondly, remote employees often work from their personal devices which are not controlled by the corporate IT team, and as such are mo