Netskope takes cloud app visibility to ‘new level’

Netskope™, the leader in safe cloud enablement, has announced the addition of Netskope Active™ Introspection to the Netskope Active Platform, and introduced the Netskope Risk Dashboard. With the addition of Active Introspection, Netskope’s customers can choose from a full array of purpose-built deployment options, making it the most flexible and comprehensive Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution on the market. The Netskope Risk Dashboard provides IT with a new interface to assess an organisation’s cloud app usage risk by drilling into contextual details about the user, the activity performed, and the rating of the app.

Active Introspection enables customers to examine, take action or enforce policies over all content stored in a cloud app. This means that regardless of whether the data was placed in a cloud app yesterday or years ago, enterprise IT can take advantage of Netskope’s leading real-time and activity-aware platform to protect it. In addition, Active Introspection provides data inventory and classification, understands app and usage context, creates a content usage audit trail, and can be deployed alongside Netskope Active Cloud DLP. Finally, Active Introspection enables IT to change data ownership, alter sharing permissions, quarantine data for review (by IT, legal, security, HR, etc.), or even encrypt specific data—and these, plus additional actions, can be triggered automatically.

With the addition of Active Introspection, Netskope’s array of flexible and non-mutually exclusive deployment options now cover the full spectrum of cloud app use cases. These options include the ability to discover and control apps, activity, and data, through a combination of methods that have zero network footprint and support remote and mobile usage.

“While it’s a given that cloud apps are being used in nearly every enterprise today, safe cloud enablement is by no means a ‘one-size fits all’ solution,” said Sanjay Beri, founder and chief executive officer at Netskope. “I talk to a lot of customers with four or more different use cases to address. They want to enable the entire organisation to use Office 365, for example, while also addressing risky use of unsanctioned apps for everyone who works in an office, remotely, or on a mobile device. Through this introduction of Netskope Active Introspection, our customers are seeing how our solution can adapt to address their needs.”

“Organisations that use SaaS and are seeking higher levels of control over their user and data access will increasingly find that SaaS introspection products will facilitate their activity control and auditing needs, thereby reducing the potential for data leakage, audit findings or regulatory sanction,” wrote Jay Heiser in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security, published on July 25th 2014.

A true assessment of risk
As enterprises increasingly rely on cloud apps, there has been a corresponding rise in the sharing of sensitive business information between apps. According to the most recent Cloud Report from Netskope, organisations have an average of 508 apps, 88 percent of which are not enterprise ready. Discovery of cloud apps alone is not enough to direct behaviour that puts organisations’ proprietary and sensitive information at risk. The Netskope Risk Dashboard presents a clear interface for organisations to analyse risk that goes beyond app and user information to include context like user activity (such as upload, share or edit), and the content involved (such as matches a DLP profile for sensitive data). The breadth of analysis provides a powerful and unique risk assessment tool, enabling users to create more effective policies according to specific needs.

“Through Netskope's deep cloud visibility capability and risk dashboard, NetApp gets the cloud app visibility and information needed and a true assessment of risk,” said Sujeet Bambawale, enterprise security architect at NetApp. “Ultimately this means we can engage in more meaningful conversations with our business units about their objectives and accelerate our move to the cloud in a safe way.”

With the Risk Dashboard, IT gets visibility into data and content in cloud apps, assesses the sensitivity or accessibility of content in real-time, and can rely on Active Introspection to confidently use cloud applications and classify data, regardless of when the information was originally placed into the app in the first place.