Industry thought leaders share CIO concerns and innovative approaches for 2014
LOS ALTOS, Calif. – Jan. 22, 2014 – Netskope, the leader in real-time cloud app analytics and policy enforcement, today announced its participation at RSA, the world’s preeminent conference on IT security’s most important issues. At the conference, Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri will moderate a panel titled, “Let Your Users Go Rogue,” discussing how CIOs can encourage their employees to use their favorite cloud apps while protecting corporate networks and sensitive data from threats.
The panel will take place on two occasions:
– Wednesday, Feb. 26 at 10:40 – 11:40 a.m. PT in Moscone North, Room 130
– Thursday, Feb. 27 at 10:40 – 11:40 a.m. PT in Moscone West, Room 2002
Panel participants Alan Boehme, chief of enterprise architecture, business innovation and emerging technologies, The Coca-Cola Company, Arthur Lessard, senior vice president and chief information security officer, Universal Music Group, and Mike D. Kail, vice president of IT operations, Netflix, will share how they’re using big data to gain security visibility and provide practical advice for enforcing cloud policies.
In advance of the conference, industry leaders including Beri, Kail and 451 Research’s Senior Security Analyst, Adrian Sanabria, spoke about their perspective on cloud app security and the IT issues that are top of mind for decision-makers heading into 2014:
Q: What are the most pressing cloud security concerns for CIOs and CISOs today?
Sanabria: CIOs and CISOs are concerned about the security and liability of the data they have in the cloud. BYOD and cloud adoption have already happened, and IT executives are scrambling to catch up. Without the right tools and options to both protect data and enable users, IT leaders are faced with only two options: allow data to continue exist unprotected in the cloud, or shut down access to cloud apps and hurt employee productivity in the process. The need for a solution to this problem is immediate, and IT spending will rise in this area to match that need.
Beri: From speaking with CIOs every day, the biggest concern they have is that companies have not only embraced BYOD, but have moved into the ‘bring your own everything’ era. This presents a unique challenge for IT, as sometimes they’re involved in sanctioning devices and apps, and sometimes they’re not. CIOs are trying to strike the right balance between enabling employees to use the technologies that make them most productive, while protecting the business’ interests.
Q: What do you see as the key technology innovations that will help IT leaders gain a competitive advantage?
Kail: Today, mobile, social, analytics and cloud are truly integrating. These technologies have dramatically changed the IT department’s ability to provide value to the business. By leveraging the benefits of these technologies, CIOs shift the focus of their time from configuring hardware and infrastructure to creating innovative solutions that create efficiencies and compress time to market.
Beri: CIOs are enabling the cloud due to the benefits it brings to their companies, including agility, productivity and efficiency that enable innovation. As companies enable more cloud app usage, they need to gain a better understanding of which apps are coming into contact with their data, and what users are doing with the information. We are starting to see CIOs becoming interested in gaining a holistic view of app usage insights across the organization so they can set policies that ensure they’re not exposed to security and auditing risks, while still enabling employees to use the cloud apps they love.
Q: What are the hurdles IT executives face in implementing these technologies?
Sanabria: Separate from securing the cloud itself, a more sophisticated approach is needed to secure cloud apps. Most companies aren’t aware of the enormous amount of data that exists outside the firewall, and they don’t have the security staff or capability to manage, control or secure it. The emergence of next-gen firewalls has paved the way for awareness of the issue, but stopped short of its full potential, and doesn’t address the needs that have grown beyond the corporate perimeter. Many companies don’t yet know that solution providers exist to solve this problem.
Kail: Very few IT executives have a complete picture of what is going on in the network. This is a difficult problem to solve, as gaining visibility into application use by the employee base can be complex. However, as awareness of this problem grows, decision-makers are starting to understand that this insight is crucial to preventing data loss. Cloud access security brokers such as Netskope are now providing the type of granular and real-time insight across global networks that today’s leading companies are beginning to understand is critical for protecting and making their organizations more efficient.
Q: What are the benefits companies can hope to gain from implementing solutions to address security for cloud apps?
Sanabria: Close to 80 percent of cloud app use is ‘Shadow IT,’ or not sanctioned by the IT department. Recognizing the sheer amount of unsanctioned cloud app usage and data at risk represents an opportunity for businesses to become more efficient. Business leaders who are able to gain a critical understanding of cloud app usage across their organization and separate areas of risk from areas of opportunity will be in a better position to defend against data leakage, and also gain a significant competitive advantage.
Kail: For Netflix, it’s the ability to have a single viewpoint into the audit trail of usage, and then correlate events. Before Netskope we needed to login to each app’s admin dashboard to run reports and correlate trends by hand, which is too time consuming to be a viable solution for most companies. Additional benefits companies can expect to gain from implementing a cloud app security solution are the capacity to create service level agreements based actual usage, and the ability to accurately forecast. These deep insights are mission critical for any organization that wants to take advantage of the business benefits of cloud, mobile and SaaS.
Beri: Forward-thinking CIOs and organizations are realizing that in order to protect existing investments, the way they approach security needs to change. As a result of evolving their approach and implementing safeguards to protect their business, organizations will benefit from better corporate planning for IT infrastructure, as well as more productive employees – all of which drives business results – an advantage that will be valuable for the future growth of every business.
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Netskope™ is the leader in cloud app analytics and policy enforcement. Only Netskope eliminates the catch-22 between being agile and being secure and compliant by providing complete visibility, enforcing sophisticated policies, and protecting data in cloud apps. Netskope performs deep analytics and lets decision makers create policies in a few clicks that protect corporate data and optimize cloud app usage in real-time and at scale. With Netskope, people get their favorite cloud apps and the business can move fast, with confidence.
Netskope is headquartered in Los Altos, California. Visit us at www.netskope.com and follow us on Twitter @Netskope.