Skyhigh Adds 50+ Cloud Services to 'Enterprise-Ready' Program
More than 50 companies, including Docusign, 8x8, and Ping, have joined Skyhigh Networks' list of enterprise-ready cloud service providers through its CloudTrust Program. The program is a third-party assessment of a cloud service’s ability to meet enterprise needs, evaluated on considerations including identify verification, service security, data protection, and legal protection.
Certification of enterprise-readiness, something like a Verisign of cloud apps, helps security teams filter through the wealth of cloud service providers available to their employees. For context, the average financial services sector is exposed to over 1,600 cloud services used by their employees. Unsecured services, including note-taking and file-sharing programs, put an organization’s sensitive data at risk. Across industries, the number of services that enterprises are exposed to grows 20% to 30% quarter-over-quarter.
Enterprises want to be selective of the services they offer to their employees, explains Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh Networks, “They can say, if you want my services you must be enterprise ready, that becomes motivating to cloud services.”
Skyhigh does not charge the cloud service providers (CSPs) for the assessment, and gives reports on the issues holding them back from being enterprise ready. On average, two to three services per week are added to the CloudTrust program.
Enterprises get data-driven assessments to answer employee questions, including why staff should not use a particular app because it is creating risk for specified reasons, and suggestions to use another less-risky service instead. “Because there is data, you find employees are more likely to comply than because you’ve said 'I told you so.'”
"While security is lacking for many cloud services, 7 percent of cloud service providers have invested time and resources in developing services that adhere to rigorous enterprise security requirements. We started the Skyhigh CloudTrust program to highlight these services and ease the cloud adoption lifecycle for CIOs and IT departments,” added Gupta in the press release.
“Verification also helps them to market their service. Especially for the smaller firms this helps them in terms of their journey to higher revenue.”
Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio
Tweet This