Back 
This is a series of articles focused on Next Gen SWG use cases. This is the second in a series of six posts.
Flashback nine years ago to 2011. As a member of the security team, you have been asked to add exceptions to your Palo Alto Networks next gen firewall and Blue Coat proxy appliance to give employees access to Microsoft’s new productivity suite, Office 365. What started with Salesforce years earlier, the deployment of Office 365 is really where your business started on the path towards being “cloud first.”
Fast-forward to 2020. In addition to Salesforce and O365, IT is now managing dozens of cloud apps such as Workday for HR, Confluence and Jira for engineering collaboration, and Slack for company-wide collaboration. In addition to the dozens of cloud apps managed by IT, your employees are now rapidly adopting cloud apps on their own. A recent Netskope cloud report found that, on average, an enterprise is using more than 2,000 cloud apps and most of that usage takes place outside of IT. From adopting apps like Evernote and Trello to improve productivity, to using their own instance of Office 365 and G Suite to store and share data, cloud apps adopted by lines of business and users outside of IT are helping to support your booming business. Shadow IT used to have a negative connotation, but today it enables your employees to better collaborate and move fast.
The only negative consequence is that the rapid adoption of cloud, combined with users being mobile and remote, has resulted in losing visibility and control, which is a huge problem. As a member of the security team, your job is to manage risk and protect your company’s data. This shift to the cloud is causing you to rethink your overall security program.
Legacy security vendors that provide security services from physical boxes that are entombed in your data center are also seeing this shift to the cloud and in an attempt to keep up, they are offering “cloud versions” of their security appliance. There are also security vendors that started in the cloud several years ago with a security service that is delivered from the cloud. Delivering security from the cloud only solves a small part of the challenge. The type of security you are delivering from the cloud is what really matters. If you are simply placing your existing legacy firewall or SWG controls in the cloud, then you are forced into the situation you had in 2011 where you are dealing with coarse-grained block vs exception policies. Only this time, those ancient policies are delivered from the cloud. The good news is that there is a much better way to address this growing need.
In a recent blog, I started a series covering the most common use cases our customers are covering with our Next Gen Secure Web Gateway (SWG). The use case I want to focus this blog post on is how to apply granular controls for the unmanaged cloud apps that lines of business and users adopt outside of IT.
Instead of disrupting the business by blocking the potentially thousands of cloud apps not managed by IT or increasing risk by simply allow listing or adding allow exceptions, safely enable the cloud by applying granular controls and targeting risky activities. A Next Gen Secure Web Gateway needs to provide the granular control required to stop the bad and safely enable the good.
Unlike other security products, Netskope’s NG SWG was architected from the beginning to provide real-time granular visibility and control of thousands of