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SaaS applications have fundamentally transformed business operations by enabling on-demand user access to services and data via the internet from anywhere. Yet, despite countless benefits, SaaS in the enterprise is fraught with cybersecurity challenges.
Addressing SaaS sprawl
It goes without saying that SaaS adoption has experienced exponential growth across every industry and market segment. The sprawl of SaaS is demonstrated by the ever increasing quantity of SaaS applications used within organizations. In fact, our research suggests that a typical enterprise overall uses 2,400+ distinct cloud services and SaaS apps.
Another manifestation of SaaS sprawl is the increased usage of unmanaged apps, or shadow IT, across virtually every business function inside the organization. Despite organizations trying to tackle the shadow IT challenge for years, a good example that it still persists is the rapid adoption of genAI apps by employees across virtually every industry. Findings in Netskope’s January 2024 Cloud & Threat Report, state that genAI apps, which were virtually non-existent in the enterprise until late 2022, are now a mainstay, with more than 10% of users accessing cloud-based genAI apps each month and the top 25% of users exponentially increasing their use of these apps.
Clearly, SaaS sprawl (including genAI apps) becomes problematic when organizations lose sight of the SaaS applications in use and their cybersecurity risks. The absence of visibility and lack of control over your SaaS estate can result in security incidents, compliance issues, and exposure of data.
Unscrambling the SaaS chaos
Gaining visibility into your SaaS estate provides insights into how your employees engage with different categories of applications, application-specific vulnerabilities, activities that may lead to security issues, application usage, and the extent of their interactions. By obtaining this visibility with contextual risk insights, you are empowered to make informed decisions, manage risks, and maximize the value derived from your SaaS investments.
Traditional cloud access security brokers (CASBs) leverage manual app identification and app risk categorization processes to build a library of applications that can offer customers some level of insight into SaaS usage, but they often fall short in providing timely, accurate, and scalable visibility needed to effectively manage and secure the exponential growth of a modern SaaS environment.
Netskope’s industry-leading CASB solution, part of the broader unified Netskope One platform, enables you to quickly identify and manage the use of your growing SaaS estate, regardless of whether the apps are managed by IT or are shadow IT.
The Netskope Cloud Confidence Index™ (CCI)–our repository of over 80,000 enterprise SaaS applications–automatically audits your traffic to discover your overall risk profile across every application used within your organization. The CCI’s machine learning-based risk categorization is anchored in objective criteria encompassing the application’s security, auditability, and resilience in ensuring uninterrupted business continuity, with a high accuracy rate for assessing risk in applications.
Supercharging SaaS security with genAI-driven app risk discovery
Here at Netskope we enable businesses to proactively address the latest security challenges in safeguarding SaaS environments. We already lead the industry in terms of the number of apps supported and the number of attributes supported across those apps.
To better serve our customers in the age of AI, we are not just protecting our customers’ use of genAI, we’ve expedited the process of app risk categorization by using cutting-edge genAI-driven algorithms and large language models (LLM) within our own technology. Utilizing our genAI engine, we aim to extend the scope and precision of our app risk discovery to an unprecedented level.
The genAI engine that powers Netskope’s SaaS security risk categorization is designed to extract relevant contextual information from each new SaaS application that has not yet been classified in the CCI. The models swif