Since Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) came onto the scene a few years ago, the industry has debated CASBs’ role in the cloud application encryption value chain. With more than 30 percent of business data now in the cloud, identifying and protecting the confidentiality of sensitive or regulated content is critically important. That said, much of cloud apps’ value is in how easy they are to use and collaborate, giving business and IT professionals pause when it comes to deciding what protection mechanisms to put in place and how onerous they should be.
Some CASBs built their business model around performing gateway encryption for apps like Salesforce.com or Box. While this has generally worked for unstructured data, it has had mixed results for structured data like the “notes” field in a database: From a compliance and risk management standpoint, encrypting regulated data has served as a useful check box, especially in the event of a data breach. However, in many cases, gateway encryption has rendered apps nearly unusable because it has broken search and sort, not to mention created performance issues associated with backhauling traffic on-premises.
To address the dilemma, leading app vendors have built native encryption into their p