As the cloud becomes more central to data storage and information exchange than ever before, the enterprise risk to the security of that data is also escalating.
With the volume of high-profile data breaches occurring, companies have a heightened awareness of the risk that can result from data loss but are challenged to close all the loopholes. According to the 2014 IOUG Enterprise IT Data Security study, conducted by Unsiphere Research and sponsored by Oracle, enterprises recognize that data risks come from within, and continue to increase funding. Still, close to half still release production data to outside parties, and more than one-fifth report sensitive data is still vulnerable to breaches. Enterprises recognize that data risks come from within, and continue to increase funding. However, close to half still release production data to outside parties, and more than one-fifth report sensitive data is still vulnerable to breaches.
And, according to a new Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey, titled Cloud Adoption, Practices and Priorities Survey Report, which surveyed more than 200 executives and IT managers, close to 72% indicated they did not know the number of shadow IT apps within their organization. Although security of data remains a top barrier to cloud adoption, organizations are still moving forward in adopting cloud services, the survey finds, with 74% of respondents indicating they are either moving full steam ahead, or with caution, in the adoption of cloud services.
To help organizations adopt software-as-a-service offerings such as Salesforce.com, Box, Gmail, Office365, and Xactly without risking data exposure, impacting business processes or sacrificing SaaS functionality, Protegrity, a provider of data security solutions, is extending its data security platform into the cloud with the introduction of the Protegrity Cloud Gateway.
“Our clients have told us that current cloud data protection gateways cannot be configured easily by their internal teams, don’t always recognize the sensitive data that needs to be protected, negatively impact the speed or functionality of the SaaS solutions, or have limited scalability,” said Suni Munshani, CEO of Protegrity. “Ushering in the next generation of cloud data security, the Protegrity Cloud Gateway addresses these concerns and responds to our clients’ demand to have us apply the same trusted technology we use to protect their core on premise systems to their ever-growing adoption of cloud applications and services.”
Deployed in an appliance framework, Protegrity Cloud Gateway sits between cloud applications and users, replacing sensitive data with format-preserving tokens or encrypted values before being sent to the cloud. A gateway server cluster handles the traffic to and from the cloud, while the Protegrity Enterprise Security Administrator (ESA) provides client security teams central control of policy, protection methods, automated key management, security event alerting, reporting and auditing.
Enabling identification of sensitive data elements being generated by users on the network, the gateway monitors and discovers if and when that sensitive data is exposed so that it can be protected prior to being sent to the cloud and unprotected when it comes back to authorized end users.
In addition, for customersthat require a cloud data security solution able to scale vertically and horizontally to support geographical distribution of SaaS solutions, the solution has been built using a stateless architecture, so that individual server nodes are independent from each other and do not share any transient state information at run-time. With a stateless architecture, server nodes can be geographically distributed without sacrificing speed or reliability to deliver the highest level of performance, no matter where the cloud gateway nodes are located.
For more information about Protegrity Cloud Gateway, visit www.protegrity.com.