Skyfence, a cloud security gateway startup acquired by Imperva earlier this year, announced on Tuesday the availability of a free tool designed to provide organizations visibility into cloud app usage and risks.
Cloud-based applications can be highly useful for an organization, but monitoring them could prove challenging for IT departments. According to Skyfence, enterprise IT teams can use Skyfence Cloud Discovery to monitor Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and services, and determine, based on risk information generated by the tool, which of them could pose a security threat.
Organizations can quickly generate accurate cloud app usage reports by importing log files from firewall, SIEM and Web proxy solutions into Skyfence Cloud Discovery. The reports contain detailed information on traffic volume, number of users and risk information for each cloud app, Skyfence said.
One of the advantages of Skyfence Cloud Discovery is that it’s installed and run on premises, so the log files used to generate the reports don’t leave the corporate network. This is an important aspect since the logs could contain sensitive data and uploading them to a remote location might be a violation of a company’s data privacy and security policies.
“Most companies recognize that cloud apps pose a potential security threat, but lack the tools to assess the depth and breadth of the problem,” commented Ofer Hendler, CEO of Skyfence. “While many vendors are charging high fees for visibility into SaaS Apps, the Skyfence Cloud Discovery Free Tool makes it easy and affordable to quickly, securely and accurately discover cloud app usage and risks across an organization.”
The issue of visibility and “shadow IT” in SaaS security was detailed recently in a SecurityWeek column by Danielle Au, head of product marketing at Adallom.
“Some enterprises may choose to have controls around certain applications (i.e. Block Dropbox), but the reflexive clamp-down controls represents a mentality of the past,” Au wrote. “Since IT’s new role is to enable, the knowledge you can gain from discovery of shadow IT applications can help you understand popular cloud applications that you may not be aware of and institutionalize them for the rest of the company.”
Skyfence Cloud Discovery, which is part of the Skyfence Cloud Gateway product suite, can be downloaded for free and used to generate an unlimited number of reports.