Quickbooks Online - Irish Version

No system is 100% secure and you will not get access to the operations details behind the scenes so you will just have to trust them. There are lots of things that can happen in the background from bugs in the software to operations all issues such as backups failing, network encryption being turned off, passwords being cached before encryption and lots of things you would not even think of. You do not have control over what happens in these environments that is the risk you take.

Well if all you are doing is the calculations then you've probably lost the game in any case.

If you are going to use one of these online accounting services among the things you need to think about is this: these sites are well known stores of sensitive dada and they are under hourly attack by hackers. Now most of these hackers are amateurs and are easy to deal with, but a few professionals will breach first line defenses and some may go further…. So when you put your data up there your advertising your data to the hackers and better on the providers staff being smarter that the hackers…..

And if they do get through what next? If your provider is the victim of an attack similar to that a the HSE, then your first problem will be operational - you won’t have access to your data and will have difficulty in delivering timely services. The second problem is that you have no idea who has your clients data and the first you may here of is when the client complains about his accounts being splashed all over the internet.

All environments have the potential to be hacked, that is just a fact of life. A system level attack like I described else where is much less likely than in a small provides like an online accounting system say. But hacking your individual account could be easy or difficult depending on how you manage it. If you advertise if you share document links, use easy to guess passwords, fail to regularly change passwords and so on.

The starting point for you, is do you need to have your data hosted on a third party environment? If so then how can you mitigate the risks involved. Examples might include:

• Use an obscure account name, so that it is not possible to guess the owner nor suggest the type of data contained there in
• Anonymize the data as much as you can, so that if it falls into the wrong hands, it is less likely to embarrass you or your clients
• Make sure you have an up to date back up copy, so that in the event that you can't access cloud version, you have a fall back option
• Use good passwords
• Regularly change passwords
• Don't share accounts or passwords
• Don't use the same account names and passwords across systems
• Be conscious of login dates and times, file creation/update dates and times etc... so you can detect unauthorised access or changes