Despite initial challenges, businesses have finally realized that migrating to the cloud is the intelligent thing to do. It offers incredible opportunities to the entire organization, from developers, to employees and to the C-Suite, and allows businesses to move faster while delighting customers with intuitive and more intelligent applications.

As a result, over the past few years, organizations have transitioned from being cloud-fearing, to cloud-friendly, to now cloud-first.

The trend isn’t limited to software-as-a-solution (SaaS) migrations but also includes the move to using infrastructure-as-a-solution (IaaS)-powered business and customer applications.

According to a recent Gartner forecast, the worldwide IaaS market grew 31.3 percent in 2018 to total US$32.4 billion up from US$24.7 billion in 2017. Overall, the company’s analysts predict that the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 17.5 percent this year to total US$214.3 billion, up from US$182.4 billion last year.

Interestingly, cloud-migrations, especially in the SaaS and IaaS space, are being driven by the ability to leverage a combination of technologies such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence though simple-to-deploy, intelligent solutions.

Moving to the cloud is great for businesses and their customers, it also poses new and significant security risks. Without the proper tools and security posture in place, businesses can be at risk of confidential data loss, cloud-native breaches and compliance exposure.

Experienced security professionals whose organizations are aggressively capitalizing on cloud capabilities are working with McAfee to protect their data, defend against cyber threats and avoid compliance violations and regulatory actions.

McAfee’s portfolio includes MVISION Cloud, a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution that protects organizations across the board on their journey to the cloud, allowing them to better identify, categorize, and control all of their critical information running across all types of cloud services including SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. What’s more, it simplifies an organization’s ability to see and control all of its cloud data with a common policy engine, ensuring a consistent security posture for all users.

A CASB solution is an on-premises or cloud-hosted software that sits between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to enforce security, compliance, and governance policies for cloud applications & services of practically any flavor.

Simply put, a CASB solution allows an organization to extend security controls and policies it enforces on its on-premise infrastructure, to its applications in the cloud. Analysts have referred to CASB as the “firewall” for cloud services.

CASB solutions make it easy for businesses to gain visibility into how employees are using IT cloud services, including user activity across the enterprise — allowing the team to not only understand the security risks that the organization faces but also pin-point the preferred services of the organization.

By providing visibility, a CASB solution is able to help organizations eliminate shadow IT situations where staff access cloud services that aren’t sanctioned for “safe use”. Instead, organizations can play the role of an enabler by identifying cloud services in demand, ensuring their safe deployment, and greenlighting them for use for any users across the enterprise.

Source: McAfee

While security & visibility are the biggest advantages of McAfee’s CASB, this well-structured CASB also ensures organizations are able to adhere to data security policies, meet data privacy compliance requirements, and detect and respond to negligent or malicious insider threats, privileged user threats, and compromised accounts — in real-time.

According to research from Gartner, next year, up to 60 percent of large enterprises will be using a CASB solution to protect themselves — which is in line with the rate at which organizations are moving to the cloud and climbing the digital maturity curve.

As the cost of data breaches increase and internal and external threats (in the cloud) get more sophisticated, organizations need a smarter and more intelligent security solution, one that’s designed for hybrid, cloud & multi-cloud use, and that can prevent cloud-native breaches.

McAfee MVISION Cloud is a great choice for those looking for something that not only has a reputation for security across platforms and technologies but also a strong portfolio of clients who vouch for the effectiveness of the solution. These are business users with significant quantities of mission-critical data and numerous cloud service deployments — just like yours.

To learn more about McAfee MVISION Cloud’s clients and learn what they have to say about the solution, read their case studies and testimonials here. Alternatively, reach out to a McAfee MVISION Cloud Security Advisor to discuss how McAfee can protect your business and help you adopt a better security posture while you expedite your journey to the cloud.