Security and Privacy concerns of Small & Medium Australian Accounting practices after adopting Cloud-based accounting packages.

Security and Privacy concerns of Small & Medium Australian Accounting practices after adopting Cloud-based accounting packages.

The role of this research is to: qualify and quantify the type and number of data breaches, if any, that have occurred in cloud computing systems as used by Small & Medium Australian Accounting practices; understand the risk mitigation strategies employed to minimize and, hopefully, remove security and privacy breaches; prompt, or extend, the post-implementation reviews that are necessary after adoption of new technology with these reviews based on agreed Service Level Agreements (SLA’s). The research questions presented will form part of an empirical study into the Security and Privacy concerns of Australian S.M.E.’s. This data will allow for comparison between different sizes of businesses to ascertain preparedness and strategies for risk mitigation. It will also give an insight as to whether different referring accounting bodies have more proscriptive guidelines surrounding recommendation and implementation of Cloud computing systems. The qualitative measures surrounding data reliability and ownership are being used to identify security and privacy concerns around data storage facilities and practices. The research is not intended to delve into the perceived benefits to the organization because of implementing cloud computing but rather the possible problems that could be, or have been, encountered. This research shows that Small & Medium Australian Accounting practices are well suited and well trained in practices to reduce and prevent data breaches and loss of data from their accounting packages. This research does not consider any possible breaches that might have occurred in other packages or from other suppliers.