January 2017 Cloud Report: Half of all users of a sanctioned cloud storage service have a personal instance of the same service

Today we released the January 2017 Netskope Cloud Report – global as well as Europe, Middle East and Africa versions. This quarter we focus on differentiating between corporate and personal instances of cloud storage services. We found that half of all users of a sanctioned cloud storage service like Box have a personal instance of the same service. Specifically, this means that if you have 1000 users on your corporate Box instance, you actually have 501 instances of Box being used in your environment (the original sanctioned service instance plus 500 individuals’ private versions). And so why is this important? Instead of managing just your corporate instance, be sure to differentiate between personal versus corporate instances so you can apply distinct, granular policies – like allowing sensitive data to be shared from and uploaded into your sanctioned instances while restricting corporate content from being uploaded to personal instances.

Cloud service usage this quarter passed the four-digit mark, rising to 1,031 average services in use (up from 977 of last quarter). Microsoft continues to have the most cloud services in the top-used cloud services list, with Office 365 OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Outlook.com taking the top two spots. Slack debuted last quarter and rose in rankings to number 16 this quarter, while ServiceNow makes an appearance at number 20.

This quarter, we also shared an update on our EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) metrics and found that only 33.7 percent of cloud services are rated “high” on our GDPR-readiness scale. This means many cloud service vendors have some work to do before they are fully compliant.

And for the first time, we broke out ransomware as a category of malware detection. Backdoors actually comprised the majority of detections at 43.2 percent, followed by adware at 9.8 percent, and Javascript malware at 8.1 percent. Ransomware made up 7.4 percent of detection. We saw less of the common carriers of ransomware this quarter (Javascript malware, Microsoft Office macros, and PDF exploits) but have seen a rise in actual ransomware infections throughout the quarter, hence the breakout of the category. Mac malware, Microsoft Office macros, mobile, and others made up the rest of the detections at 6.7 percent, 5.3 percent, 5.2 percent, and 14.3 percent, respectively.

Check out our full report for all the stats (including DLP and cloud activities) and recommendations from Netskope.