One of Netskope’s more popular taglines is “Allow is the new Block.” Many times, customers and prospects will ask me what that means and how it impacts them. To answer, I walk them through their usage of cloud apps, and more often than not, we discover that they have more exclusions in their proxies or firewalls than policies meant to stop traffic. This has created a gap where many cloud apps are allowed into an ecosystem than initially intended – sometimes called “proxy creep.”
What is proxy creep? Also known as “exception sprawl,” it happens when exclusion rules have allowed shadow IT applications in your network. A great example is many times companies work with external vendors, and those vendors have a corporate sanctioned file-sharing site. Those include Dropbox, Box or Office 365. Proxy or firewall exclusion will be set to allow the cloud storage of the vendor. This in turn allows all the other users to access that application, as well as personal version of the corporate-sanctioned app to be used. Unknowingly, proxy creep has been created and new applications are inside your ecosystem.
How can you identify if you have proxy creep? Do you have a good process for handling your exceptions (for example, do you have good controls in place for limiting the exception to a small group of individuals or adhering to a time limit? Have you tried blocking by category and then creating an exception for the application? If you bypass the apps, do you have any *.URL rules applied? Can you easily access URLs like box.com, dropbox.com or live.com? Does your company use an online customer relationship management (CRM) solution like salesforce.com? How is tha