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Today, we announced that we have been issued our second comprehensive CASB patent for delivering granular visibility and enforcing granular policy and data security for cloud delivered services. This patent complements the first by recognizing our unique ability to enforce cloud policy controls at a granular level, enabling IT to move beyond a coarse-grained “allow” or “block” approach to cloud services toward enforcing fine-grained policies based on a variety of conditions including deep cloud context and the the associated activities and data. In this blog, I’ll walk you through the life of a cloud transaction to help bring this patent to life with a real-world example.
If you Google the term “life of a packet,” you get almost 50 million results, explaining everything from how routing works to the ins-and-outs of a SYN flood attack. For decades, a large part of our security conversation has been focused on network traffic.
Today, we are focused on cloud security. Forrester predicts that companies will spend more than $2 billion over the next five years to secure data in the cloud, while Gartner names cloud access security brokers its number one information security priority.
The cloud (and a lot of the web) has moved beyond the language of the network. Rather than speaking in HTTP gets, HTTP POSTs puts, and bytes up and down, the cloud and web speak the language of APIs. The beauty of APIs is – besides being incredibly useful for integrating services faster and more efficiently – they are reflective of the activities we actually do in the cloud. This means that when we view, share, download, upload, approve, edit, post, or create in a cloud service, we are actually doing those things via API calls.
So why are many security vendors (including some cloud access security brokers) still speaking that old language? At Netskope, we have perfected the skill of decoding this language, whether it’s being used in a sanctioned or unsanctioned app and whether it’s originating from a desktop, remote laptop, or mobile device. By decoding APIs, we’re able not just to see activities in a handful of sanctioned apps, but across all apps, as well as also ascertain a host of additional contextual metadata about users, devices, apps, times and locations, and content. Beyond decoding APIs, we also normalize them across cloud apps. When you “share” an object such as a file from a cloud app, that activity may result in different API calls depending on the app implementation. Even the wording could be different – it could be “share” in one app, “Create a share link” in another, and “Invite to collaborate” in yet a third. If you’re enforcing policy in just one app, that’s fine, but if you want to enforce a policy such as “Don’t share content outside of the company from ANY file-sharing app,” you need to set it at a category level to have it apply across the dozens of file-sharing apps you have running in your organization. That’s why not just decoding the “share” is important, but normalizing the “share” across many different types of apps is also critical.
Let’s look at the