In a guest post on the Computer Business Review website Simon Bain suggests that IT departments should worry more about employees making use of public cloud storage providers than they should about the move to BYOD.

“It is now very simple for employees to store documents, for free, using any number of file storage providers such as Dropbox or Google drive. There is also an increasing number of applications that can be downloaded that help with office work. Where data is stored and how securely within these applications is often a mystery. In either case, once out of the enterprise IT environment it becomes impossible for CIOs to know where company data is, or who has access to it.”

Companies, quite rightly, take great care to make sure important documents are kept secure, however employees using public cloud solutions throws a major spanner in the works. Once a document is on a public cloud the risks of it being accessed, amended, or deleted by an unauthorised person increase dramatically. Worse, the IT department may have no way of tracking the unauthorised access or retrieving the document.

Choose your own private cloud

Cloud storage is great for companies. It liberates team members, allowing them to easily show off a company brochure on a tablet device, edit a customer quote whilst sat with the client and work as productively out of the office as they do in the office. The solution to the problem of using a public cloud is for businesses to create their own private cloud, using technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint.

Private cloud storage combines the simplicity and anywhere-access or a public cloud with document access controlled on a user-per-user basis. SharePoint documents can be accessed on any modern tablet OS and team members can use local copies of Microsoft Office to edit Office documents straight from the cloud. Making instant updates available to those back in the office.

For a simpler, all-in-one approach Microsoft Office 365 combines secure business cloud storage with Office applications and email.