2014-10-06

The final week of August 2014 highlighted the news of a cyber attack against a large organization, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. As government agencies sort through what exactly happened (believing the attack to have originated from Russia,) the public has been reminded of other prominent cyber attacks of late. eBay was hit in an attack in which customer passwords were stolen. Customer credit card data was stolen in a January 2014 cyber attack against U.S. retailer Target. Of course, for those of us in business, these are familiar stories.

Unfortunately, news stories like these are happening more often all the time. So it’s perfectly understandable that you’d be concerned with your company’s security. Now is the time to be proactive in putting safeguards in place to halt security breaches before they happen because, let’s face it, cleaning up a mess is never as pleasant as preventing one.

Some of the ways you can protect your business, your data, and your customers might surprise you. It’s not all about putting up firewalls and fencing-in your digital assets, it’s about protecting a complex network of cloud-based and localized resources. And that calls for certain tools.

Here are six online security apps to help you protect all the potential “back doors” that could compromise your business.

FlashPanel

FlashPanel is a Google Apps management application that gives administrators tight controls over who’s accessing what. If your business hinges on Google Apps, FlashPanel makes your life easier by providing a convenient dashboard to authorize and audit user access.

FlashPanel makes it easy to revoke access to employees who leave the company, which is one common way data breaches can occur. FlashPanel also brings together a wealth of usage data in its dashboard, which can help you spot suspicious accesses and other opportunities to take preventative steps to protect your business.

Features of FlashPanel:

Discrete Email Audit Monitoring

Google Groups Management

Policy Scheduling & Enforcement

Shared Contacts Management

Simple Email Delegation

Robust Email Signatures

Directory Management

Customizable Reporting

Access Control

Inbox Delegation

Apps Butler

User deprovisioning workflow

Bulk user provisioning / deprovisioning

Google Drive Sharing Policies

Google Calendar management & delegation

Google Apps Training Videos

Additionally, FlashPanel provides extensive educational material for users, so you can find new ways to implement its functions and adapt to new threats.

CloudEntr

CloudEntr focuses on single sign-on access to your vast array of cloud-based apps. Usernames and passwords can easily be compromised, either through forgetfulness, password cracking routines, or plain old phishing. CloudEntr guards the gate, you might say.

CloudEntr is beautifully simple. Just sit back, sign in, and access ALL of your apps, without all the chaotic password recovery song and dance.

Features of CloudEntr:

Single Sign On

Password Manager

Strong Authentication

Mobile access and management

Reporting

Role-based access

30-day free trial

CloudEntr makes the password maze a whole lot easier to navigate, and that can be one of the best steps you can take to keep track of who’s getting in.

Panda Cloud Office Protection

Panda Cloud Office Protection is server-less protection for for your cloud-based business. Panda leverages cloud-based protection alongside traditional, endpoint security to create a completely secure network.

Panda has an impressive complement of auditing tools, including malware protection and user access auditing. These factors combine to make Panda a security suite that bridges the localized, entry point standards of yesterday with the latest in cloud-based innovations.

Features of Panda Cloud Office Protection:

Maximum cloud based protection

Web administration console

Proactive anti malware for workstations and servers

Managed personal firewall

In-depth malware audit service

P2P and automated updates

Administration of security by profiles and management delegation

Flexible installation

Group-based license management

Detailed, Summarized and Executive Reports

Panda Cloud Office Protection keeps your business going 24/7, and it does it with an impressively small resource footprint.

SmartCryptor

SmartCryptor helps you encrypt your data – all of it, any of it.

SmartCryptor offers unparalleled encryption in that there are no security keys to store (thus, to be compromised!), locally or elsewhere.

SmartCryptor works with local storage and cloud storage, which means it can add the same high level of protection to your hard drive as it can to online storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox.

With that in mind, if you are not looking to migrate from a cloud storage provider, SmartCryptor is the best way to add a layer of protection to your existing service.

Features of SmartCryptor:

Secure File Sharing

Unique Security Architecture

Absolute Security and Privacy

Client Side Key Management

Complete control of Data Life-Cycle

Permission Management

Audit Logs for Compliance

Works with both local and cloud storage

AD/LDAP Integration

Your Keys are never stored anywhere

SmartCryptor is a security add-on that can easily fit into your organization in a variety of ways, and it’s the one entry on this list that can bring top notch encryption to your existing storage tools, regardless of whether they are localized or in the cloud.

Are you taking the right steps to secure your business while protecting your customers?

If you’re relying solely on localized security and legacy malware protection, unfortunately, you’re leaving plenty of doors wide open where hackers could sneak in.

The cloud is great, the cloud is awesome (and we’re big believers in that here), but it does present some caveats when it comes to security. By nature, anything that you can access from anywhere, someone else could unlawfully access from anywhere. The tools on this list can help you address those concerns.

These tools augment existing security regimes, and work with traditional security measures to counter the many threats that permeate the online world, to help you dodge public relations crises like the ones that have struck major names, like Target and eBay. Don’t let it happen to you and your customers!

If you don’t see the right tool here, check out the full list of cloud-friendly security apps to, right on the GetApp website.

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