Sharing data is the basis for all business processes and what drives operations and productivity. Today, more than 50% of organizations’ data is in the cloud and the typical enterprise now deploys more than 2,400 cloud applications. Concurrently, data protection remains the nexus between cloud apps, web services, and an increasingly larger number of remote users in support of modern business initiatives. These business trends create increased data dispersion in the web and cloud, across personal, private, and corporate instances, increasing the risk of data exfiltration and inadvertent, or intentional, exposure. Saying that data protection is more difficult today than ever before is a big understatement.
Challenges
Netskope Threat Labs research reveals that sensitive data increasingly moves laterally across cloud applications such as from Microsoft Teams to OneDrive or SharePoint. A growing trend is employees exchanging data between corporate and personal app instances. Netskope research finds that 83% of employees use personal app instances on managed devices and average 20 file uploads each month to these personal apps.
- Top personal apps users upload sensitive data to via managed devices include:
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Google Drive
- Google Gmail
- iCloud
- WeTransfer
Based on the above, IT Security teams need greater visibility into and, subsequently, control over data between cloud applications and instances, regardless of the access method users employ, whether direct-to-internet, using a mobile app, web browser, or sync client, or via managed (corporate) or unmanaged personal devices. And let’s not forget email. While collaboration tool use is rapidly increasing and introduces new data loss vectors to organizations (e.g. chat, screenshot captures), email is still the leading threat vector for organizations today. Even if modern attacks need other channels like the web to compromise a client, email is commonly used to deliver the initial URL, in the form of a link to an exploit kit or phishing website, an attachment in the form of a malicious payload, or the starting point for a credential phishing attack. Thirty percent of email attacks are only the entry point for a more sophisticated attack.
Modern data protection
To address these evolving challenges, IT security teams need to modernize their data protection. Beyond simply being cloud-smart, data protection has to be web-smart, email-smart, user-smart, and more in order to be effective at reducing the potential attack surface while detecting and preventing any data loss or exposure.
Realize, however, that the modern Data Protection model involves more than data loss prevention (DLP) tools and techniques. Data protection is a process