Let ‘Em Use What They Love

We at Netskope applaud Dropbox for the release of Dropbox for Business, and are excited to be part of the company’s positive momentum in enterprises around the world with our release of Netskope for Dropbox.

Dropbox has long been perceived as a poster child for shadow IT, but in reality it is an enterprise-ready cloud solution. According to the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index, Dropbox is rated “H­igh,” and features key security, auditability, and business continuity capabilities that enterprises require. The other reality: people love it — plain and simple. Check out our man-on-the-street survey at RSA – even the hard-core security types secretly love it. It’s also super slick for mobile usage, as the top-used cloud app via mobile in enterprises.

Of course, no matter how enterprise-ready Dropbox for Business is, any organization using the cloud knows the implied shared responsibility model: cloud vendors have responsibility for making apps inherently secure, and enterprises have responsibility for ensuring their employees use apps appropriately.

In support of the enterprise’s end of the bargain, Dropbox has made available a robust API. Among the use cases they are enabling are legal hold and e-discovery and data loss prevention. Netskope is proud to announce ‘Netskope for Dropbox’, which combines our award-winning Netskope Active Platform and Introspection capabilities, resulting in the most powerful solution covering these two use case areas. Our joint customers benefit by safely enabling users to get the productivity benefits they want from Dropbox while giving IT and security professionals the granular visibility and control they need to protect sensitive data, prevent its loss, and ensure compliance.

E-discovery:

IT can get a handle on existing content within Dropbox, whether that content was uploaded or created yesterday or two years ago. In just a few steps, they can inventory content and users and understand sharing status of content (whether it is held private, has been shared internally in the company, or made public via a shared link to one or multiple users outside of the company). They can then take action such as download files for review, secure content that is deemed confidential or restricted with strong encryption (using their own keys), and notify even content owners of the actions being taken.

Data loss prevention:

With Netskope for Dropbox, IT can apply the industry’s most robust DLP to e-discovered content or to content being uploaded to or downloaded from Dropbox. They can choose to encrypt or download discovered files in Dropbox or encrypt, block, alert on, or coach users about files as they’re being uploaded to Dropbox if they contain data that’s a match for a Netskope defined DLP profile, including PII, PCI, PHI, Profanity, Source Code or other sensitive or confidential data. In addition, IT can create its own DLP profile based on 3000+ industry standard data identifiers, 400+ file types, keyword and pattern matching, and regular expressions. Beyond simply taking action on files containing data violations, they can take action in context – based on user, device, location, activity, and content type, enabling them to narrow the aperture to be precise and match the security with the content.

Protect data in Dropbox… and its ecosystem:

A unique thing that Netskope brings to the table is not just protection of data in Dropbox, but across the ecosystem. Dropbox already has a vibrant ecosystem of integrated apps that satisfy use cases ranging from e-signing to data migration to project workflows. While Dropbox is enterprise-ready, other apps may not be. In fact, according to the Netskope Cloud Report, 89 percent of all cloud apps don’t meet enterprise requirements. Using Netskope’s unique ability to protect data and ensure compliance across any app, organizations can protect data whether it resides in Dropbox or is being shuttled around as part of a workflow through a web of integrated cloud apps, sanctioned or unsanctioned.

Help organizations standardize on Dropbox:

Organizations have 31 cloud storage apps in use on average. Many IT groups want to standardize on one or a small handful of the most popular or enterprise-ready apps. For organizations standardizing on Dropbox, Netskope makes it easy. We can identify those other apps and enable IT to generated automated coaching messages to users when they try to log into or upload to unsanctioned apps. For organizations who want to enable business process involving other apps and not block those apps, IT can set granular policies allowing other apps but only allowing uploading to and sharing from Dropbox. They can get that granular, which lets them say “yes” rather than “no.”

We are excited about the release of Dropbox for Business, and look forward to helping our joint customers secure data and ensure compliance, support critical workflows with solutions that integrate with Dropbox, and standardize on Dropbox to reduce cost and complexity. But most of all, we are excited that enterprise users get to use the apps they love.