Apps Your Employees Could Be Using But Shouldn’t

The problem for many SMEs is that taking all those threats seriously is only half the battle. Unless your employees are technophobic, they will probably be bring along their own IT security threats, perhaps without you even knowing it, on their smartphones and tablets. It’s a fact of office life that many companies have employees who are using consumer facing apps that were never designed to handle sensitive information, either about your business or about your valuable customers.

Here are just a few of the apps your employees may be using to get work done that could seriously impact on your IT security.

* DropBox

* Google Drive

* LogMein

* Backupdrive.com

* uTorrent

* WeTransfer

* YouSendIt

Your employees may well have no idea of the potential security risk they are posing for your company by using these simple and helpful apps. After all, these tools are designed to make life in the office better, to ease workflow and keep everything in one place. Unfortunately, if they are using such platforms to handle sensitive data about your company, then it makes all your IT security largely pointless.

There may be several reasons why employees would use a rogue application to handle data. They might just like using it or your company may well have no similar solutions ready to hand which they can take advantage of.

Companies need to work with their IT support to find a solution if the threat of losing data on these consumer facing platforms is to be avoided and that involves not only providing employee education but also the right tools to do the job.

Microsoft Office offer SharePoint which is specifically designed for businesses and comes with all the security you would expect from a big organisation. The software allows employees to create safe sharing points for other staff, business partners and customers that can include documents, webpages, calendars and data.

Another useful tool that your employees could switch to is Basecamp which allows employees to collaborate on projects and access the information they need. It can be used on most Wi-Fi enabled devices and is a useful tool whether you are a business owner, a project manager or simply working on a project on your own.

It makes sense to have one system rather than several different ones for sharing and collaborating in your office. SMEs can start by having a robust IT support strategy in place which means that all employees know which applications are acceptable to use and which are not. This needs to be followed up with the relevant training which ensures employees know how to use a product such as SharePoint or Basecamp to their best advantage.

For all SMEs, reducing the areas where potential security attacks can occur is becoming more and more important and cutting down the number of customer facing apps that employees use is a good place to start.