Hi, I’m Ram, your friendly Netskope data scientist. You’ll hear from me from time to time on things like our Cloud Confidence IndexTM and SkopeSightsTM, our cloud usage insights. Please contact me with questions and topics you’d like to see covered in my blog.
First off, I am a believer that nothing speaks louder than data. I have worked with data for years, am passionate about analysis, and see data as the key enabler for all aspects of business including marketing, sales, and security. In today’s competitive environment (especially in cloud security software), a strong data science team is critical to success.
Using Data to Say “Yes” to Cloud Apps

Similarly, cloud services have penetrated enterprise ecosystems. The main drivers for this are ease-of-use, service accessibility, and a zero-footprint (hardware, software) on the enterprise. Organizations use cloud apps to do everything from measure employee performance, enable payroll, automate marketing, and track sales to manage software development, test the security of websites, and back up data. Looking across all of these activities, it’s easy to see how organizations’ IP and confidential information can now be found in the cloud.
With all of the benefits of using cloud services, enterprises should be happy to take advantage of them to increase employee productivity and overall business profitability. However, enter BYOD and personal cloud services. This completely changes the equation. It drives enterprises from being happy to being paranoid, from feeling safe to feeling helpless in protecting their company secrets, and from being conscious to being unaware of what is traversing the company pipes.
Let me explain why. There are several reasons for this.
- Content of the traffic to the cloud service. The connections between a user and the cloud service are typically encrypted, and hence the enterprise is unaware of the contents of these sessions. The typical questions that the IT department of an enterprise ask include:
- Is the cloud service destined to an ent