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There are a ton of vendors out there HR leaders can take advantage of, from those that specialize in wellness benefits to others that manage paid time off. Most of these services are cloud-based, offering flexibility and the ability to integrate with other systems.
“That’s the reality of business today,” says Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike. “And also the reality of being an employee: Your data is going to be put into a system, and that system is likely using the cloud.”
But uploading employee data can open your organization to threats. New cloud intrusions have increased 25% over the last year, according to a recent report from CrowdStrike, meaning more nefarious actors are looking to access critical company information or deploy malware through the cloud.
That’s why it’s essential to keep tabs on the kind of software your company uses and the kind of security measures they have in place, should data end up in the cloud. Too often, experts say, HR teams have large databases of employee data kept on a spreadsheet and will often share that same information with various vendors, says Kim Seals, senior partner at West Monroe, a business technology consulting firm.
But doing so could be risky, should said vendor be subject to a data breach, which is why HR leaders need to be more choosy about what information they send over and when in doubt, share the absolute minimum required in order for them to provide their services.
“HR teams will often create one sort of generic interface file that has everything on it and every vendor gets that same file,” she says. “But what they really should be doing is going to each vendor and asking, ‘What do you really need?’”
You can read more about how HR leaders can ensure their employee data is safe in the cloud here.
Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
