While software and hardware malfunction, theft and natural disasters are all contributing factors in workplace IT disasters, human error is most to blame for data breaches. Seventy-eight per cent of businesses have suffered at least one data breach in the past two years, the leading causes of which were malware (35%), email attacks (21%), and phishing scams (17%).

The success of any data breach from outside sources requires human interaction. This typically happens through social engineering whereby a user is tricked into clicking on a seemingly genuine link to a website or download and then infected with a virus.

Human error in the workplace will always be a factor – everyone makes mistakes. However, it is possible to prevent many common mishaps and mitigate the effects caused.

Features included as standard with Cloud Web Security such as anti-phishing and anti-malware, and URL content filtering can protect users against rogue emails and websites, while Cloud Online Backup can be used to schedule regular backups of sensitive data as part of a disaster recovery plan.