Mobile and Cloud: BFFs 4Ever

By Krishna Narayanaswamy, Chief Scientist, Netskope

We released the Netskope Cloud Report for October today. In it, we analyze the aggregated, anonymized data collected from tens of billions of events across millions of users in the Netskope Active Platform, and highlight key findings about cloud app usage in enterprise as seen in the Netskope Active Platform. This includes our count of enterprise cloud apps (579) and percent that are enterprise-ready (88.7 percent), as well as top apps, activities, and policy violations. But what was really interesting about this quarter’s findings is the level of cloud app activity occurring on mobile devices.

As we all know, mobile is the perfect medium for information “snacking.” When it comes to enterprise cloud apps, they also happen to be perfect for bite-sized work. In a world where the workday never seems to end, every minute is a zero-sum-game. So, whether it’s a quick approval of an expense report, a quickly dashed-off email, or a “while I’m thinking of it” document share from cloud storage, nearly half of all activities occur on mobile devices. Some of the most common are send (57 percent), approve (53 percent), view (48 percent), login (47 percent), and post (45 percent).

With all of those activities, mobile is also a place for an increasing number of policy violations. We define a policy violation as when a user attempts an activity on which an administrator has set a policy in the Netskope Active Platform (such as “Don’t share content from cloud storage outside of the company”). We found that 59 percent of all policy violations involving download, and more than one-third of policy violations involving a DLP profile (such as PII, PCI, PHI, Confidential, etc.), occur on mobile devices. Our researchers believe that the high rate of download policy violations on mobile devices could be due to administrators both setting “no download” policies as well as “no download to mobile” policies (the latter because that is a source of concern for data leakage, especially in the case of BYOD), both of which would be triggered on a mobile device.

See the Netskope Cloud Report infographic here and get the full report here.

Are you enforcing cloud app policies for mobile users? Tell me here or Tweet it @Krishna_Nswamy #mobilecloudbffs