Organizations are flying blind as they embrace cloud services

Organizations lack the information to understand and mitigate a broader set of risks posed by the use of cloud services, according to Skyhigh Networks.

“What we are seeing from this report is that there are no consistent policies in place to manage the security, compliance, governance, and legal risks of cloud services,” said Rajiv Gupta, founder and CEO at Skyhigh Networks. “Our cloud usage analytics suggest that enterprises are taking action on the popular cloud services they know of and not on the cloud services that pose the greatest risk to their organization. Lack of visibility into the use and risk seem to be crux of the problem.”

Data from more than 100 organizations suggests broad and rampant use of cloud services.

• 2,204 cloud services are in use across 3 million users across financial services, healthcare, high tech, manufacturing, media and services industries.
• 545 cloud services are in use by an organization on average, and the highest number of cloud services used by an organization is 1,769.

Corporate security measures are based on concerns related to productivity and bandwidth, or on the familiarity with the service as opposed to the risk of the services.

• Low-risk services are blocked 40 percent more than high-risk services.
• At 9 percent, tracking is the least blocked cloud service category despite the fact that it delivers zero business benefit and exposes organizations to watering hole attacks.
• Among the top 100 services used, the top 10 blocked services in use are Netflix, Foursquare, Apple iCloud, Gmail, Skype, Amazon Web Services, Batanga, Dropbox, KISSmetrics, and PhotoBucket.

In the development cloud service category, cloud-based repositories have gained momentum.

• The shift to open source cloud-based code repositories presents security challenges as some sites are known to host malicious backdoors.
• GitHub is blocked 21 percent of the time but Codehaus, a high-risk service, is blocked only 1 percent of the time.
• The top 10 development services in use are MSDN, GitHub, SourceForge, Atlassian OnDemand, Apple Developer, Zend Server, HortonWorks Data Platform, CollabNet, Force.com, Apache Maven, and CodeHaus.

While Microsoft may be falling out of favor with new users, it is too early to count it out.

• The 3rd most widely used file sharing cloud service is SkyDrive
• The software giant dominates in collaboration with Office 365, Skype and Yammer in the top 10 of the most widely used services in this category.
• The top 10 collaboration services in use are Office 365, Cisco WebEx, Gmail, Google Apps, Skype, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Slideshare, Evernote, and Yammer.

File sharing is widely used and the most misunderstood category by IT professionals.

• 19 file sharing cloud services are used by an organization on average, which impedes collaboration and increases security and compliance risks.
• 4 of the top most used file sharing services are high-risk.
• Box, the lowest risk file sharing service, is blocked 35 percent of the time, but Rapidgator, a high-risk service, is blocked only 1 percent of the time.
• The top 10 file sharing services in use are Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Hightail, CloudApp, Sharefile, Rapidgator, Zippyshare, and Uploaded.