Organizations aren’t just migrating to the cloud anymore, they’re building and operating right from the cloud. That’s the trend as we see it at Tech Wire Asia, now that we’re living in an age where the cloud has become a conduit to other new and emerging technologies such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Cloud maturity is now part of the early stages of the overall digital maturity curve for most organizations. It is obviously critical to the digital transformation efforts in any kind of business, in every kind of industry.

IT teams are investing in cloud-based applications for use in the business and developers are working on migrating legacy applications to the cloud and architecting new cloud-native applications to support emerging needs.

Employees in large organizations can seem to find the pace of change quite slow — which is why many teams move to the cloud on their own, using ad-hoc SaaS applications and services to suit their needs.

According to research by McAfee, large organizations often find that they greenlight an average of 30 cloud-based applications and services for use, but employees end up using as many as 1,935 in a bid to support workflows and manage workloads. That’s quite a difference between what IT departments expect, and the practical realities facing employees.

However, the first takeaway from that disparity is obviously that the move to the cloud cannot be curbed, and it shouldn’t be. The cloud helps companies do more.

According to IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will more than double between 2019 and 2023, growing from US$229 billion at the start of the forecast period to US$500 billion by the end, indicating a five-year compound annual growth rate of 22.3 percent.

Given the strong demand for cloud services, companies need to think about cloud security — and although there isn’t a shortcut, it seems as though an increasing number of large enterprises are buying into a cloud access security broker (CASB) solution.

A CASB is basically a layer of security that allows organizations to manage security on the cloud, irrespective of the services and solutions that IT sanctions and staff use. In short, if there’s anything to do with the cloud, a CASB can help protect the organization and its staff.

What’s interesting about a good CASB is that it offers a suite of capabilities such as malware prevention, authentication, application security, and data loss prevention, all of which help the business ensure that data is kept safe and away from prying eyes on the internet, irrespective of the cloud setup being used anywhere in the organization.

Further, when employees or teams attempt to use cloud-based products, services, or solutions without informing IT, a CASB effectively safeguards the organization by alerting IT and enforcing the company’s general security policy until a decision has been reached by the IT team.

Overall, organizations exploring cloud-based solutions and hoping to avoid delays on their accelerated journey to the cloud, a CASB solution is the best way forward, allowing teams, working groups and individuals the tools they need, but within the auspices of IT’s security policies and oversight.

Tech Wire Asia has reviewed two of the leading CASB solutions in the market that can benefit businesses of all sizes:

McAfee MVISION Cloud

McAfee’s MVISION Cloud platform helps the world’s largest organizations leverage the power of the cloud more safely by providing real-time protection for enterprise data and users across all types of cloud services.

The solution, a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), helps organizations adopt a better security posture in this cloud-first era, providing full visibility, ensuring smarter compliance, and allowing more intelligent data security policies across agile IT topologies. MVISION Cloud enables the business to detect and respond to negligent or malicious insider threats, privileged user threats, and compromised accounts in real-time.

McAfee’s MVISION Cloud platform helps businesses fast-track their move to the cloud, ensuring that data is protected while the business remains more agile – irrespective of the approved cloud services they use. Through this platform organizations can monitor and control “Shadow IT”, identifying unauthorized usage of cloud services while ensuring full security for line-of-business applications like Salesforce or Workday, and cloud workloads running on AWS, Azure and other IaaS services.

In today’s day and age, with reputational risks growing significantly and regulatory bodies tightening the noose on companies that suffer a data breach, security must come to mind first when moving to the cloud. With a robust end-to-end cloud security platform such as McAfee’s MVISION Cloud, realizing the full benefits of cloud services for business is now possible. Click here to read more about how McAfee is protecting enterprises in APAC and globally, here on Tech Wire Asia.

NETSKOPE CASB

Netskope is considered to be a good choice for those looking to move to the cloud quickly. The company has a strong portfolio of clients who vouch for the company’s effectiveness as a CASB solution provider, and its platform enables users to quickly identify and oversee the use of cloud applications, regardless of whether they are managed or unmanaged.

Netskope has a stong emphasis on preventing data from being exfiltrated when a network has been breached, although avoiding attacks in the first place is a strong suit of the product as well. The acceptance of a certain degree of risk is refreshing in this segment, we feel.

The company has adopted a cloud-centric approach, emphasizing the need for visibility and real-time data and threat protection when users access anything on the cloud, irrespective of their device or network.

Overall, Netskope believes it helps organizations find cloud services in actual use (shadow IT services included!) and assess risks, protect data across all cloud services, prevent use of unmanaged cloud services, protect, and provide granular control of personal devices accessing services.

Learn more about Netskope here.

*Some of the companies featured on this editorial are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia