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Hi, I’m Ram, your friendly Netskope data scientist. You’ll hear from me from time to time on things like our Cloud Confidence IndexTM and SkopeSightsTM, our cloud usage insights. Please contact me with questions and topics you’d like to see covered in my blog.
First off, I am a believer that nothing speaks louder than data. I have worked with data for years, am passionate about analysis, and see data as the key enabler for all aspects of business including marketing, sales, and security. In today’s competitive environment (especially in cloud security software), a strong data science team is critical to success.
Using Data to Say “Yes” to Cloud Apps
Whether they are aware of it or not, most tech-savvy people use several cloud services daily, including collaboration, backup, or email . The cloud is so seamlessly ingrained in our lives that we forget we are even using these services.Similarly, cloud services have penetrated enterprise ecosystems. The main drivers for this are ease-of-use, service accessibility, and a zero-footprint (hardware, software) on the enterprise. Organizations use cloud apps to do everything from measure employee performance, enable payroll, automate marketing, and track sales to manage software development, test the security of websites, and back up data. Looking across all of these activities, it’s easy to see how organizations’ IP and confidential information can now be found in the cloud.
With all of the benefits of using cloud services, enterprises should be happy to take advantage of them to increase employee productivity and overall business profitability. However, enter BYOD and personal cloud services. This completely changes the equation. It drives enterprises from being happy to being paranoid, from feeling safe to feeling helpless in protecting their company secrets, and from being conscious to being unaware of what is traversing the company pipes.
Let me explain why. There are several reasons for this.
- Content of the traffic to the cloud service. The connections between a user and the cloud service are typically encrypted, and hence the enterprise is unaware of the contents of these sessions. The typical questions that the IT department of an enterprise ask include:
- Is the cloud service destined to an enterprise-approved account? In other words, is it the personal account of a user or enterprise account being used by the user?
- What data are sent to the cloud service? Are the data supposed to reach the cloud service? How do we ensure that sensitive enterprise information (that an enterprise does NOT want in a cloud service) does not reach the cloud?
- Is there any malicious content in the traffic? If yes, how do we find out and prevent bad things from happening.
- Personal or enterprise cloud services. Most cloud services today offer both a personal and enterprise service. From the perspective of enterprise IT, it is impossible to distinguish between the two. Allowing personal cloud service usage results in two issues: unwanted enterprise resource consumption and unintentional data/information leakage.
- Impossible block/allow strategy. Currently there are close to 3,000 cloud apps that provide services in a variety of different areas and this number is increasing at a rapid rate. From a security perspective, each of these apps offers a different level of risk. A traditional approach of enterprise IT is to block as many ports/services as possible. But in the case of cloud apps it is very difficult to apply the same strategy.
- All the traffic might use the same TCP destination port, and hence they cannot be selectively blocked using traditional port based filtering.
- Several cloud apps are being used in the enterprise. A user can use the same app for his/her personal use. It is virtually impossible to distinguish these sessions using traditional firewalls.
- Keeping track of thousands of cloud apps is not a simple task.
- Employee satisfaction (and hence their productivity) is significantly affected if they are not allowed to use their favorite cloud