By now, many IT professionals recognize that a lot of business data are being uploaded to the cloud. We’re not talking about photos of soccer games or the company holiday schedule, we’re talking about business data, and IT professionals have estimated this number to be around 30%. IT sees the data going to cloud (SaaS) apps they’ve sanctioned and they know it’s also going to shadow apps that they’ve not had visibility over. It is well established now that latter — the shadow IT apps — represent 90% of the 900+ cloud apps in use in the average enterprise. Aside from the alarm that this lack of control brings, there’s something that has loomed even bigger in the minds of IT — the fact that their enterprises are largely unprotected from threats that originate from the cloud. Per a recent survey commissioned by Netskope and conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group, 85% of security professionals surveyed stated that they are concerned about cloud apps as a means of distributing malware.¹ What complicates this is that the cloud, by its very nature, is designed as the ultimate dissemination vehicle. Whether it’s through a sync client, mobile app, or share button, the cloud creates a “fan-out” effect for malware through its well-woven tapestry of cloud-connecting endpoints. This exponential increase in complexity of cloud security due to the threat landscape and frequency of attacks has also led to an unprecedented shortage of skills and cognitive overload for IT security professionals.
With this in mind, we are proud to announce our next major product release, the industry’s first cloud threat protection solution that addresses threats that may originate from — or be further propagated by — cloud apps. We start from a strategic vantage point of cloud app usage. Put simply, Netskope is the only