Skyhigh Networks, a Cupertino, California-based startup offering cloud visibility and control solutions, on Monday emerged from stealth mode and officially launched its new solution designed to help enterprises know which cloud services their employees use, and the associated risks those services may pose.
According to the company, the Skyhigh service is capable of discovering, analyzing, and controlling employee use of more than 2,000 cloud-based services across more than 30 categories such as storage and collaboration. Example services include popular ones such as Box.com, Microsoft Office 365, GitHub, Salesforce.com and many more.
Once discovering which cloud services are being accessed by enterprise users, the service provides detailed ratings on the potential risks associated with each service, using a weighted assessment of more than 30 security and legal risk factors.
“The Skyhigh Networks Cloud Services Manager gives enterprises total control over access to cloud services and over the data being shared with cloud services from mobile devices or from the corporate network,” the company explained in a statement.
Using a homegrown engine powered by Hadoop, the Skyhigh service analyzes cloud service usage and detects anomalies that could indicate potentially harmful use or information leakage.
Additionally, Skyhigh compares use of services with paid subscriptions to help organizations reduce their costs and eliminate unwanted or redundant services.
The service also enables IT administrators to control access to and encrypting the data being sent to specific cloud services so employees can safely use those services from any location, without requiring an additional software agent on the device or interfering with the user experience.
Skyhigh capabilities include:
• Discovery: Log-based discovery and objective, customizable risk assessment of all cloud services in use by employees;
• Analysis: User, service, device, and data behavioral modeling and anomaly detection, utilization, benchmarking, and trending of all cloud service use;
• Control: three-click intermediation of selected cloud services for access control and encryption of data with enterprise-owned keys.
Skyhigh allows customers to:
• Discover their enterprise cloud exposure through complete visibility into the use and risk of all IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services used by employees;
• Isolate potential data leaks, security breaches, and regulatory and internal policy non-compliance from the specific use of cloud services;
• Identify cloud services which should be approved, controlled, consolidated, or subscriptions reduced based on actual usage and industry best practices;
• Access approved cloud services from mobile devices with full control without requiring a device agent, VPN, or traffic back-haul.
“For the first time, enterprises can take advantage of the cloud without treating it as a threat and having it become Shadow IT,” said Rajiv Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Skyhigh Networks. “We give enterprise IT organizations immediate visibility, insight, and control so that they can enable cloud service adoption without friction to the employee or the provider”.
Venture-backed by Greylock Partners, Skyhigh was also nominated as a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award.