The safest cloud apps for the enterprise

Enterprises today no longer have a choice about whether they embrace the cloud as their employees are already using cloud apps to perform critical business functions, often without IT’s involvement.

Netskope data scientist Ram Keralapura comments: “Cloud services have penetrated enterprise ecosystems. The main drivers for this are ease-of-use, service accessibility, and a zero-footprint (hardware, software) on the enterprise.”

“Organizations use cloud apps to do everything from measure employee performance, enable payroll, automate marketing, and track sales to manage software development, test the security of websites, and back up data. Looking across all of these activities, it’s easy to see how organizations’ IP and confidential information can now be found in the cloud,” he added.

Netskope analyzed data from its Cloud Confidence Index (CCI), a database of more than 2,600 cloud apps. They reviewed app characteristics such as security, auditability and disaster recovery, and assigned each app a CCI score between 0-100.

What immediately jumped out after analyzing the CCI data are the app categories that rank high and low in the CCI. The bottom-scoring cloud app categories in terms of average CCI score are Software Development, Marketing and Productivity. These categories fall short because they lack features such as app compliance certifications, encryption of data at rest and enforcement of complex passwords.

The top scoring cloud app categories are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Document Management and Security. The top-scoring apps tend to address audit logging, granular role-based policies and separation of customers’ data in the cloud much better than bottom-scoring apps.

The complete report is available here (registration required).