June 2016 Cloud Report: Majority of Cloud Apps Not Ready for GDPR and Malware on the Rise in Sanctioned Cloud Apps

Today we released our quarterly Cloud Report for June 2016 – global as well as Europe, Middle East and Africa versions. Besides our regular stats of cloud app usage, we had three primary sections: GDPR-readiness of cloud apps, cloud threats and malware, and an update on cloud data loss prevention (DLP).

On the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) front, our major finding is that over three-quarters of all apps are not GDPR-ready and compliant. In future quarters, Netskope will begin publishing a GDPR-specific readiness score for cloud apps (in addition to our general enterprise-readiness score). In our preliminary research, we’re using eight requirements to assign a low-medium-high rating to cloud apps: 1. Geographic requirements; 2. Data retention; 3. Data privacy; 4. Terms of data ownership; 5. Data protection; 6. Data processing agreement; 7. Auditing; and 8. Certifications. Learn more about these by reading the report.

When it comes to cloud threats and malware, malware continues to increase in enterprises, with an average of 11.0 percent of enterprises e-discovering malware in their sanctioned apps, ranging from one to several dozen instances. This matches our expectations based on current security trends. But what’s startling is that a full 26.2 percent of malware files are shared either with internal or external users or publicly. As described in our malware fan-out post, this shows how easily cloud threats such as malware can propagate from one user to many — and why enterprises will need systems and solutions in place to detect and remediate malware. In this report, we drill down on our findings of the malware and include categorizations for the detections.

Cloud app usage stayed relatively constant, with a slight increase from 917 to 935 average cloud apps in use at enterprises. The Microsoft Office 365 suite continues to lead the pack in top-used business productivity apps, with Office 365 Outlook.com, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, Yammer, and Lync in the number 2, 3, 12, 19, and 20 spots, respectively. Our updated cloud DLP stats show that Cloud Storage apps still dominate cloud DLP violations, at 73.6 percent of the total.

Read the full June 2016 Cloud Report to check out all the stats and recommendations from Netskope.