Organizations need to place cloud DLP controls on popular collaboration services

Today, we announced the release of the quarterly Netskope Cloud Report. As cloud service usage reaches a threshold across organizations, we found a decrease in the average number of cloud services at 1,053, a slight decrease from last quarter’s 1,071. Most of these services are still not enterprise-ready, with 93.6 percent rated a “medium” or below on the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index (CCI).

And for the first time, we broke out collaboration services as a category in our DLP analysis across customers. As shown on our top 20 list of most-used cloud services, Slack has been rising in the past three quarters, coming in at number 12 this quarter. Reflected in this is the fact that in the cloud service category cut of DLP violations, collaboration services like Slack and HipChat make up 9.8 percent of the violations. Webmail was still the top category with 43.3 percent of violations, followed by cloud storage with 30.6 percent, and other with 16.3 percent. We think that as collaboration services are increasingly popular and replacing the functionality of email to share files and collaborate, more and more sensitive data will flow through these services. Security teams need to ensure that the proper visibility and control are in place for the services – as well as for connected ecosystem cloud services that employees use to share data with them.

On the GDPR side, we check in with a few metrics to measure the readiness and compliance of cloud services. The metrics have changed little, with 66.9 percent of services not specifying customers own the data in their terms of service and 89.9 percent of cloud services not supporting encryption of data at rest. The deadline for compliance is a little less than a year away in 2018 and the fines of 4 percent of turnover or 20 million euros are steep. Organizations would do well to either accelerate their GDPR cloud compliance plans or start the process if they haven’t already to know where personal information is and how that information is being used in the cloud, before taking steps to secure this data.

Finally, this quarter, we introduce the concept of a hybrid threat, an increasingly relevant threat faced by organizations as the lines between web and cloud services converge. The Netskope Threat Research Labs defines a hybrid threat as malware that uses both cloud and web services to deliver malicious payloads or perform an attack on a system or a user. These threats may be delivered in a variety of ways, from phishing emails to compromised websites, with command and control servers hosted in places like IaaS, cloud storage services, and websites. We see a rise in these threats as attackers find ways to infiltrate organizations and do harm.

For more information on cloud trends and stats, check out our report here.