Cloud is the New Frontier for Data Loss Prevention Tools
Posted by skyhighnetworks on May 12th, 2014
According to IT analyst firm Gartner, the market for data loss prevention tools increased to $670 million in 2013, up from $300 million just 3 years earlier. While many companies have deployed a DLP solution to enforce compliance policies for email, the next frontier according to experts is where employees share and collaborate on information today – in a vast array of free or low cost cloud services.
The average company uses 759 cloud services, and this number is growing 20 percent each quarter. Just 7% of these services maintain the type of security controls required by most enterprises for on-premise software, exposing corporate data in the cloud to risks not seen in the IT stack used by companies. However, experts don’t see the growth of cloud slowing anytime soon.
With all that data moving to potentially risky services, IT security teams are scrambling to extend their data loss prevention tools to cloud services. One approach, companies can use a cloud security platform to act as a broker between the DLP solution in place and the thousands of cloud services available. These solutions can automatically broker traffic to the cloud and enforce policies.
Commonly, companies configure policies to alerts users of policy violations or block certain types of highly sensitive information being uploaded in the first place. “When it comes to data in Box, Jive, Google Drive, or Salesforce, companies want the same controls their Data Loss Prevention Tools provide for data on-premise,” according to security researcher Paul DeFabrio.
When a user uploads a document containing social security numbers to file sharing and collaboration platform Box, for instance, they should receive an alert and the file will be replaced with a tombstone, indicating it was removed for a compliance violation. “That type of user education is common with the leading data loss prevention tools on the market today,” says DeFabrio.
Author:
Skyhigh Networks, the cloud access security company, enables companies to embrace Cloud Services with appropriate levels of security, compliance, and governance while lowering overall risk and cost. With customers in financial services, Data Loss Prevention Tools, healthcare, high technology, media, manufacturing, and legal verticals, the company was a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award and was recently named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner, Inc. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Skyhigh Networks is led by an experienced team and is venture-backed by Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information, visit us at http://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-data-loss-prevention/ or follow us on Twitter @skyhighnetworks.
