Cloud Security: Technologies You Need to Safely Use the Cloud
One of the bigger challenges IT organizations face today is that no one is really quite sure how many applications are being used by their organization thanks to the rise of shadow IT. In fact, most IT people generally underestimate how prevalent usage of unsanctioned cloud applications actually is inside their organization.
To help IT organizations get a better handle on just how rampant such cloud application usage is, CipherCloud today announced CipherCloud for Cloud Discovery, an application that analyzes firewall and proxy logs to not only discover all cloud applications in use, but also determine the risks those applications might represent to the organization.
Because CipherCloud for Cloud Discovery is designed to be deployed on a private cloud, Paige Leidig, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for CipherCloud, says that the IT organization is the only entity that gets to see the audit logs. In contrast, Leidig says that when IT organizations rely on other services that provide similar cloud application discovery capabilities, the internal IT organization loses control over the audit logs.
In addition, CipherCloud for Cloud Discovery, which is an extension of the data loss protection (DLP) software that CipherCloud developed, also provides the ability to export data in a range of formats via Splunk indexing and analytics software.
To give IT organizations a better sense of the potential risk of using unauthorized cloud applications, CipherCloud has developed a knowledge base of applications to which it has assigned various levels of risk. When the auditing process is finished, CipherCloud for Cloud Discovery then generates a risk score for each cloud application being used.
After being in denial about the prevalence of shadow IT services in their businesses, many IT organizations are now being held responsible for managing applications both inside and outside of the four walls of the traditional enterprise. Of course, you can’t manage what you don’t know about in the first place, so the first step to figuring out how to manage the cloud begins with a little self-discovery.
