CloudLock unveils Community Trust Rating

CloudLock unveiled the Community Trust Rating as part of its Cloud Information Security Suite at RSA Conference 2013.

The third-party application trust assessment system uses the collective intelligence of enterprises using Google Apps. Expanding on its Apps Firewall for Google Apps solution, CloudLock’s Community Trust Rating helps businesses evaluate which third-party applications should be granted access to employee data. By showing the percentage of CloudLock customers that have classified each application as “trusted” or “banned,” enterprises can better determine which apps to embrace and promote, and which apps are not appropriate for the corporate domain.

The Community Trust Rating is made possible by the phenomenal growth of Google Apps, with the cloud-based productivity platform’s revenue expected to surpass $1 billion in 2013. As the top security ISV in the ecosystem, CloudLock signed partnership agreements with all top Google Apps resellers, and more than doubled its customer base.

“When companies move to cloud platforms, they do so to enjoy greater collaboration and improved productivity while still maintaining the same information security, governance and regulatory requirements of their on-premise systems,” said Gil Zimmermann, CEO and co-founder of CloudLock. “Cloud security is unlike traditional preventative approaches to security that put obstacles in the path of users. That strategy is fundamentally flawed because employees have shown resourcefulness and outright refusal to abide by security policies that inhibit their productivity. CloudLock enables organizations to build content-aware actionable security practices and policies that govern the use of corporate data as an augmenting security layer that provides insights into employees’ actual usage of the official cloud environment.”

Enterprises quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the thousands of third-party apps available to extend and customize their cloud-based platforms. While many of these applications can increase efficiency, productivity and collaboration, companies lack the resources to research each available application.

CloudLock’s Community Trust Rating System provides enterprises the ability to easily gauge whether specific add-ons are acceptable for corporate use based on application access scopes as well as ratings from similar organizations. As the backbone of the Community Trust Rating System, CloudLock relies on aggregate, anonymous data from its customer base to serve as a benchmark for businesses’ decisions around which third-party applications will be leveraged in their environment.

All cloud platforms today allow end-users to grant access to third-party applications. CloudLock’s Application Firewall transforms Google Apps into a platform where customers can apply enterprise-wide application security policies in a manner that is both scalable and not prone to human-error.

“Preventative controls do not just prevent bad things from happening — they often also prevent opportunities. Preventing the use of new mobile devices or cloud services limits the opportunities they provide. Allowing their use, but with onerous controls, doesn’t always solve this dilemma,” said Tom Scholtz, research vice president, Gartner.