A Blue Coat Systems` analysis of 15,000 cloud application came back with a shocking outcome.
As it turned out, 99% of the investigated apps didn’t comply with the standards to properly protect companies` data in the cloud. They didn’t provide an adequate security or a satisfactory compliance controls and features.
According to the Blue Coat`s report, shadow data, which unsupervised employees store and share via cloud apps, is still a critical threat. Statistics show that roughly 23% of it is at risk to be publicly shared not only among other employees but among outer parties as well. It also became clear that companies are using 20 times more cloud apps than they estimate, mostly using an average of 841 across their extended networks.
“The vast majority of business cloud apps we analyzed do not meet enterprise standards for security and can put companies at risk for compromise even though virtually every enterprise uses them,” – states the PhD and Director of Security and Elastica Cloud Threat Labs at Blue Coat, Aditya Sood -“This is troubling when you think about the financial risks faced by enterprises due to insecure or non-compliant apps. Understanding which cloud applications your employees are adopting and using is an important step to identifying which apps are business ready and which apps need to be replaced with more secure alternatives.”
While the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is already in effect, a new standard for cloud application compliance and security has been set by the European Commission. Non-compliant cloud apps are considered a global threat and, as they are massively used worldwide, there is an increased concern when it comes to their ability to compliance, data protection, security controls etc.
Important stats:
- 95% of company cloud apps don’t comply with SOC 2
- 71% of company cloud apps don’t provide multi factor authentication
- 63% of user cloud activity shows attempts for data extrusion
- 37% of user cloud activity indicates attempts to hack into user accounts
- 12% of publicly shared files contains confidential data like source code or legal information
- 11% of company cloud apps remain at risk from exploits such as Logjam, FREAK, Poodle SSLv3, CRIME, Poodle TLS and Heartbleed.
“Adopting new cloud applications can increase a business’s productivity and enable organizations to become more agile, but with rapid migration to the cloud comes a significant number of security and regulation challenges,” – said Mike Fey, the President and COO at Blue Coat Systems – “An effective and comprehensive security solution must provide granular visibility and control over cloud apps and meet new cloud security regulations like the EU’s GDPR to qualify as enterprise-grade for organizations doing business in the cloud.”
