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A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Livius Feinbaum, one of our senior systems engineers in New York, wrote a blog entitled “Telling the Difference Makes a Difference With Cloud App Instances” (if you haven’t checked it out, do). In our marketing materials and conversations with prospects, we’ve started emphasizing the idea of differentiating between cloud app instances in cloud access security broker (CASB) tools, but not enough in my opinion. As a reminder, differentiating between cloud app instances means you (or more importantly, your cloud security tools) can tell whether an instance of an app is the corporate-sanctioned or someone’s personal instance.
As our customers embrace and, indeed, make cloud services a strategic advantage for their businesses, when it comes to governing and securing those services, they are maturing and realizing how important it is to differentiate between cloud app instances. The reason this is important is because I’ve heard other CASB vendors say “Sanction one app and block the rest at your perimeter.” That sounds beautifully simple if you don’t think about it. But if you DO think about it, the conclusion you’ll come to is that the corporate and personal versions of Box, Dropbox, Google Apps, Evernote, and so on – basically any app that has a personal and corporate version – are not created equal and not used equally. Why on earth would you want to set a one-size-fits-all policy (especially one that is a binary “allow” or “block,” which, by the way, is so yesteryear) on an app like that?
Rather than tell you how important I or Netskope customers think this is, the best way to convince you is through examples. Here are the fabulous five – five real-world examples sourced from our customers of meaningful policies they’ve been able to enforce when they can differentiate between app instances.
- Monitor corporate Box but don’t monitor personal instances
Many organizations want to monitor activity and data within their corporate-sanctioned instance of an app while respecting the privacy of its individual users. - Monitor corporate Dropbox and only audit activity in personal instances in the case