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There are more SaaS applications in use by businesses than ever before—and the adoption rate is only going to continue to increase. According to Netskope’s annual Cloud & Threat Report, SaaS adoption continued to rise in enterprise environments throughout 2023, with users constantly accessing new, mostly unmanaged, apps and increasing their use of existing apps. In fact, users’ interactions with cloud and SaaS apps are increasing at a rate of 35% per year to nearly 2,000 activities per month today including uploading and downloading files, posting messages, and other activities.
Into that mix has also come the rapid rise of genAI apps—their wild popularity has galvanized the world’s attention on how the power of AI can be leveraged for a variety of tasks. The applicability of genAI models is wide-reaching and genAI apps will only grow in number to support a variety of use cases that directly correlate to employee productivity. Findings in Netskope’s Cloud & Threat Report include that more than 10% of enterprise employees access at least one genAI application every month, compared to just 2% a year ago.
SaaS Sprawl and New Cloud Exposures: The Modern Nemesis of Corporate Data
SaaS sprawl in the enterprise, coupled with the rapid adoption of genAI, challenges every organization’s data security strategy. This trend heightens the risk of data exposure across an expanding array of external environments. Additionally, SaaS applications, modern data sharing practices, and external collaboration further exacerbate the potential for data breaches and non-compliance. For example, sensitive data such as confidential documents and financial plans can be accidentally and irrevocably shared on corporate collaboration apps like Slack and Teams in channels that include external users.
As for the impact on security operations? Think about severe management fatigue resulting from the onslaught of diverse application environments, where corporate data is more exposed than ever. Organizations are also challenged by the task of reconciling policies governing cloud access risks with those managing data and risks within the cloud environments to ensure cohesive and comprehensive security. Managing multiple policies often involves handling different incident response workflows and using various consoles.
At Netskope, we’ve designed solutions that empower businesses to stay ahead of emerging trends that threaten their SaaS security—even with genAI in the mix. We believe that overcoming security risks arising from modern data sharing behaviors and genAI in SaaS environments, as well as simplifying SaaS security, requires an updated, modern approach that legacy products can’t solve.
Implementing Modern SaaS Security
Our Netskope One platform, which unifies our market-leading SASE and security service edge (SSE) capabilities, uniquely secures organizations and data from all modern SaaS risks, ensuring the broadest visibility and control of an organization’s entire SaaS estate, including the use of pervasive genAI apps. It also provides the most advanced enterprise data protection as part of a fully converged solution that makes SaaS security management not only more effective, but also undemanding.
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