Sage provides a powerful family of ERP solutions. Sage 100, 300, and X3 can be deployed on-premise or in a cloud hosted environment. Many businesses are going to the cloud option for scalability, access from multiple locations, and a reduced need for in-house administration. However, managers are rightly concerned about security issues. Putting important business records on an Internet-accessible service requires confidence that outsiders won’t be able to read or alter them.
Having sufficient security in a cloud service has two parts: hosting management and the Sage application support.
Cloud hosting management
“The cloud” simply means “somebody else’s computers,” or more precisely, somebody else’s computers sharing resources dynamically among multiple users. We can call this the public cloud to distinguish it from related cloud models. Each cloud provider is different. Some are more expensive than others. Some offer more reliability, data capacity, and throughput. Some have better security practices.
Large organizations can use a private cloud. This means your organization’s own computers, performing dynamic allocation among its own users. It can provide better security, since the whole machine restricts access to authorized users and services, but it’s less scalable and requires in-house IT services or a management service.
The virtual private cloud (VPC) splits the difference. It’s a public cloud service, but with a greater degree of isolation from other users than normal cloud services. The client gets a fixed and separate set of resources from the vendor, which it can then use like a private cloud without the in-house IT support.
The best public and virtual private cloud services offer their own security advantages, since they have a physically secure location, monitoring, and staff that can address any problem immediately.
In some cases, strict security requirements may require keeping sensitive data only in an on-premises system. It may still be possible to use a hybrid cloud approach, with the most sensitive functions kept internal and the rest deployed to a cloud service.
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Sage support and administration
With any data system that users can access through the Internet, it’s vital to take administrative responsibilities seriously. Sage provides options that will help keep intruders out.
The administrator can create security groups based on the roles of each user. Users should have only the permissions which they need to do their job. For instance, an employee who works only on accounts receivable shouldn’t have access to payments. This protects against unauthorized employee actions while reducing the damage that someone who steals a password can do.
All versions of Sage let the administrator set password controls. Requiring complex passwords — ones that have letters, digits, and special characters — makes it harder to create easily guessed passwords like “password.” Requiring a minimum password length of at least 8 characters will help; longer passwords are vastly harder to guess than short ones. Finally, locking out a user after a specified number of failed logins will frustrate password guessers.
Sage lets administrators require users to change their passwords after a specified number of days, but this doesn’t really do much except encourage them to write them down where someone could find them. Password attacks come in bursts, not spread out over the year.
For some situations, a conventional on-premises installation of Sage or a private cloud version is the best answer to security concerns. However, with a reliable host and good administrative practices, a hybrid cloud or virtual private cloud can combine the benefits of scalable offsite hosting with the necessary level of security.
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