Mitigating risks for financial services' hybrid workers

Cloud storage and file sharing has never been more essential within financial services. Businesses have been kept apart in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has now continued for a significant period of time that firms have battled against to operate remotely.

To illustrate the point, more than a billion files have been uploaded to our platform during the pandemic, which has far exceeded what we would typically expect, and a large proportion come from FS Tech firms who are sending files between remote teams. But these aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet; they are essential files that keep businesses running. 

However, research has found that 47% of Europeans do not backup their files at least once a day, putting such vital files at risk. One in ten, meanwhile, have never backed up their files, which makes for concerning reading. This is particularly dangerous for those who utilise file storage and cloud sharing while working from home, and perhaps, are not automatically saving files online through these platforms. 

This is where file backup services become even more important to protect businesses and their users from theft, hard drive failure and ransomware. If you imagine people in financial services might be sending a simple spreadsheet, or an invoice, which could be lost by simply not having an auto-save or storage feature, it costs a business productivity and has an impact on the bottom line.

Fortunately, the pandemic has shone a light on the need for real-time collaboration, and this means that precious files within banks, or FS firms have been kept safe, but more must be done to remove any elements of risk. Risk mitigation is top of the agenda for compliance and risk teams, and this had been deemed a less-essential area prior to the pandemic, but not now.

As the European Union seeks to strengthen regulation of tech giants, rallying against monopolisation and commercialisation of customer data (among other claims), a survey found that 66% of Europeans avoid data backup services offered by ‘Big Tech’ firms because they aren’t sure how secure their data is. If organisations cannot trust big tech firms, and customers have a negative opinion of them, where do businesses turn? Well, it must be well-thought out, and risk mitigation becomes the number one decision making factor.

More remote users means more connected devices like smartphones and laptops, as well as the differences between security protocols. This is where security features that limit permissions for users become important, combined with having file auto-saves to limit wasteage, to complete the picture.

With more and more information being put into the cloud, it is alarming to see so many firms failing to back up their files properly. But we have seen a growing trend in Europe in recent years, with people rejecting Big Tech and calling for more secure cloud services that do not seek commercial gain from the data they store.