Cloud Apps and Business Risk

Anybody who’s aware of shadow IT also knows there’s an astounding number of cloud apps in use in the average enterprise. According to our latest Cloud Report, the average company has 715 such apps in use. It’s also clear that most IT organizations are only aware of 10 percent of these apps and sanction even fewer for use in the organization. What about the rest? Block them? Allow them with some monitoring? Allow them, but enforce a DLP policy?

Up to now, our customers have been making their decisions based on the inherent enterprise-readiness of those apps – things like product security, SLA, legal, current un-remediated vulnerabilities, and so on. These enterprise-readiness parameters, which are part of Netskope’s Cloud Confidence Index, have been adapted from the Cloud Security Alliance and have proven useful in helping organizations compare between two or more apps that are under consideration for purchase, identify specific risks in apps in which business data reside, and even facilitate conversations between customers and their app vendors.

But there is an important piece of the puzzle that we recently added it to our framework: business viability. We have just incorporated the well-regarded Dun & Bradstreet business viability score into our Cloud Confidence Index. The score is a measure of probability that a company will be in business in the next 12 months as compared with all other businesses in the same country.

We also made the Dun & Bradstreet business viability score queryable throughout our product. This means you can not only understand the business viability for an app that’s of interest to you, or compare across apps, but you can pivot on that parameter. For example, you can easily query to see all uploads within a particular time period to apps with a low business viability score of medium or below or report on ongoing users of low-viability score apps.

So next time you’re assessing the risk of apps, reporting on usage of risk parameters that matter to your business, or making a decision between two apps, make sure to take advantage of this important new risk measure.