Procurement News Notice |
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| PNN | 690 |
| Work Detail | If you are interested in the impact of shadow IT — using consumer grade apps — on enterprise security and their readiness to comply with the pending European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), then read on. The occasion was a Netskope briefing of media and analysts by the recently appointed Tony Burnside, regional sales director, Asia Pacific, and Jamie Barnett, chief marketing officer based in the Los Altos (CA) head office. Netskope is a cloud access security broker and that term is almost as young as the company itself. It was founded in 2012 by a group of distinguished engineers from Palo Alto, Juniper, Netscreen, and McAfee. A CASB acts like an intelligent, watchful, ever alert security guard, allowing an organisation’s security policies to reach beyond its physical infrastructure. CASBs consolidate multiple types of security policy enforcement including authentication, single sign-on, authorisation, credential mapping, device profiling, encryption, tokenisation, logging, alerting, malware detection/prevention and so on. In simple terms, it inspects all the traffic between a company and its apps, whether on-premise or in the cloud, and keeps bad ones from doing damage. The remainder of this interview is paraphrased. Burnside is an experienced enterprise technology sales and channel executive with more than 25 years in Europe, North America, and Australia. He has helped many early stage companies grow from initial product shipment to significant revenues across the globe, including Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks. He was Netskope’s Regional Sales Manager for the New England region in the U.S. Netskope BarnettBarnett joined Netskope before its first product launch in October 2013. She is impressive – both in deeply understanding the tech and the issues. Before Netskope, she was in product management and marketing leadership roles at enterprise mobility software company Zenprise, security leader McAfee, and sensor software start-up Blue Vector. She has also held some management positions at EMC, including co-founding the data management company’s security division and leading the charge for its acquisition of RSA Security. She has a bachelor of science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford University. We covered so much ground that the best place to start is to say that “apps” have invaded the enterprise – the majority are using an average of 935 apps and 94.6% of those are not enterprise (GDPR) ready and lack key functionalities such as security, audit and certification, service level agreements, legal, privacy, financial viability and vulnerability remediation. For example — and Netskope makes it clear it is not specifically pointing a bone at the following apps — there may be a danger in allowing consumer apps like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Uber, Dropbox, or even Angry Birds on a corporate network but these are amongst the most blacklisted apps in enterprise because all allow for some compromise that could leak corporate data. Users love consumer cloud apps because they can improve productivity and because they are cool. The problem with unsanctioned and non-enterprise grade apps is that this “Shadow IT” can spread throughout an organisation like a virus. It is better to have Netskope see all apps on the network and give granular approval than to simply, blacklist them. Netskope now holds a patent on this granular data governance and security policy enforcement on cloud applications. Netskope’s chief executive Sanjay Beri called it a “broad patent” that covers the ability to set policies for cloud app usage based on a number of variables, including device type, user profile, behavioural analytics and, perhaps most importantly, what data is being accessed in that cloud app and what is being done with it. The technology’s ability gives enterprises the proper context and control in how their cloud apps can and will be used. Most web application firewalls use basic “block or allow” policies instead of Netskope’s insight and control around how a cloud app and the corporate data tied to it are being used. Netskope helps its customers discover the number of native apps installed on employee devices. One recent discovery was a company had a large number of its employees using the native Dropbox client (not the enterprise approved client). Because it did not have the ability to monitor this traffic using traditional perimeter controls, it did not even know Dropbox was being used. Netskope also frequently uncovers dozens of very high-risk, low-quality file sharing services, some of them in questionable countries that present unacceptably high risk because there’s no visibility into what’s being shared and with whom. Cloud Storage apps dominate cloud DLP (data loss prevention) violations. Another major change is the move to mobility and bring your own devices (BYOD). Netskope has had to find a way to allow all devices to access corporate data — find a way to say yes — and not block the app but block risky behaviour. Its biggest competitor is the enterprise that does nothing because it is all too hard, so they blacklist and lock down, and that can affect productivity and staff morale. Sometimes the IT department and the line of business (LOB) needs don’t align. Many Netskope customers use information from its cloud confidence index (CCI) and results from its discovery to make informed decisions on which apps to allow. Netskope can manage this and has adopted “Allow is the new block” as its mantra. Barnett changed the track to malware hiding in apps. Netskope’s recent cloud report has revealed a surge of malware lacing cloud-based applications sanctioned by enterprise IT departments. It found that, on average, from January through March, 11% of its customers discovered malicious software in apps approved for business use. And more than 25% of those tainted files were shared with other users or with the public. SaaS has emerged as one of the most significant threat vectors for malware. The vast majority of cloud apps aren't formally sanctioned by IT, nor is IT even aware of them in many cases, and this number will go up in the short term as businesses evolve their security strategies to detect better and control their cloud app ecosystems. App categories where policy violations occurred included Cloud storage drove the most violations by app category, contributing 73.6% Webmail was at 22.1% Download was the most popular violating activity, at 53.0% Upload and share were at 24.0% and 22.7% respectively Adding a layer of policy visibility — whether those violations also involved DLP — personally-identifiable information (PII) violations accounted for 43.7%. Protected health information (PHI) contributed to 29.4%, source code 24.1%, and “confidential” and other regular expressions 2.8%. |
| Country | United States , Northern America |
| Industry | Information Technology |
| Entry Date | 02 Sep 2016 |
| Source | http://www.itwire.com/security/74521-75-4-of-cloud-apps-fail-data-protection-regulations.html |
