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Cloud applications play a crucial role in our personal and professional activities. Every day, without even thinking about it, we access dozens of cloud apps, where we store all kinds of data from financial information to family pictures.
Netskope has coined the phrase “Cloud Data Sprawl” for this trend, and a few simple numbers summarise its extent:
- An organisation with 500-2,000 employees uses an average of 1,558 cloud applications per month
- 138 (9%) of these are used to upload, create, share or store data
- The number of cloud apps in use grows in parallel with the size of the enterprise; an organisation with 2,000-4,000 employees uses on average 204 applications for upload, creation, sharing and storage of data—a number that soars to 326 apps for organisations with more than 4,000 employees.
Now imagine you are starting a new job at a new “average” organisation. In your first few weeks you are likely to be assailed by requests to authenticate your new registration on a wave of apps—used for HR, productivity, finance, or team-specific tools. It is possible that you have already used some of these apps in past work experiences—or at least heard of them—however, in many cases you will find yourself in new territory, registering for new services you have never encountered before, or receiving unsolicited emails asking you to confirm your new account because someone behind the scenes (handling your onboarding) has registered you.
A conscientious employee will likely be driven to guilt for the number of times they have to check in with a colleague to confirm that these emails are legitimate. A less conscientious or under-confident employee will not want to be awkward and assume everything is safe and genuine.
If the process is not well managed by the organisation, and the registration steps to the cloud apps are unclear or ambiguous, the user may easily become confused, with serious security implications. And you may be surprised to see how little information is included in these “request to confirm registration” emails sent to your employees by your cloud service providers. The expectation of trust is high.