Cloud security for accounting firms
Secure digital file sharing has been a boon to accounting organizations, enabling more efficient interactions with clients and collaborators, especially as remote work becomes established as a permanent feature of work and as clients increasingly expect and demand an excellent, easy experience mediated by technology.
But it’s not enough anymore. That’s why growing numbers of firms are turning to cloud computing to streamline collaboration and reduce errors. They’re also leveraging cloud-based platforms and applications to improve the client experience, control costs, simplify remote access, improve security, and boost flexibility and scalability.
Efficiency and security concerns
As revealed by CaseWare International’s 2022 State of Accounting Firms Trends Report, based on a survey of over 3,000 accounting professionals, 57% of respondents report that their client engagement process needs to become more efficient, even though 77% are already using secure collaboration software to enable online client communication and file-sharing. Across the accounting industry generally, adopting new technology is considered a major challenge for practice management.
If the accounting industry is coming later than others to full-fledged cloud adoption, that is largely due to concerns about security and regulatory compliance. However, aggressive adopters are finding a new generation of cloud-first solutions and capabilities that ensure comprehensive security and data protection across applications and other workloads deployed in the cloud.
Cloud-first security and compliance support
In order to reap the full benefits of the cloud — and to make the transition as fast, secure, and easy as possible — accounting firms should seek out solutions that provide:
- Complete application and API security including DDoS protection, bot protection, defense against supply-chain attacks, and more, such as Barracuda Cloud Application Protection
- Advanced, multi-vector security against email-initiated attacks to minimize risk from phishing, ransomware, and other sophisticated email threats, such as Barracuda Email Protection
- Advanced security and performance optimization for your entire network, including Zero Trust access controls, advanced SASE and SD-WAN capabilities, web security, and more, such as Barracuda Network Protection
- Modern cloud-based data protection that uses end-to-end encryption, immutable backups, granular recovery, and more to prevent accidental or deliberate loss of data no matter where it resides, such as Barracuda Backup and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup
No turning back
Whether firms are embracing the cloud whole-heartedly or taking small, incremental steps toward fully leveraging the cloud, the move to the cloud is only going to accelerate, as growing numbers of firms recognize the critical competitive benefits to be gained, in terms of happier clients, more productive workers, and streamlined costs. By implementing a modern, comprehensive approach to security in the cloud, they ensure that the transition entails no increase in risk, and in many cases a net risk reduction.
