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There are more SaaS applications in use by businesses than ever before—and the adoption rate is only going to continue to increase. According to Netskope’s annual Cloud & Threat Report, SaaS adoption continued to rise in enterprise environments throughout 2023, with users constantly accessing new, mostly unmanaged, apps and increasing their use of existing apps. In fact, users’ interactions with cloud and SaaS apps are increasing at a rate of 35% per year to nearly 2,000 activities per month today including uploading and downloading files, posting messages, and other activities.
Into that mix has also come the rapid rise of genAI apps—their wild popularity has galvanized the world’s attention on how the power of AI can be leveraged for a variety of tasks. The applicability of genAI models is wide-reaching and genAI apps will only grow in number to support a variety of use cases that directly correlate to employee productivity. Findings in Netskope’s Cloud & Threat Report include that more than 10% of enterprise employees access at least one genAI application every month, compared to just 2% a year ago.
SaaS Sprawl and New Cloud Exposures: The Modern Nemesis of Corporate Data
SaaS sprawl in the enterprise, coupled with the rapid adoption of genAI, challenges every organization’s data security strategy. This trend heightens the risk of data exposure across an expanding array of external environments. Additionally, SaaS applications, modern data sharing practices, and external collaboration further exacerbate the potential for data breaches and non-compliance. For example, sensitive data such as confidential documents and financial plans can be accidentally and irrevocably shared on corporate collaboration apps like Slack and Teams in channels that include external users.
As for the impact on security operations? Think about severe management fatigue resulting from the onslaught of diverse application environments, where corporate data is more exposed than ever. Organizations are also challenged by the task of reconciling policies governing cloud access risks with those managing data and risks within the cloud environments to ensure cohesive and comprehensive security. Managing multiple policies often involves handling different incident response workflows and using various consoles.
At Netskope, we’ve designed solutions that empower businesses to stay ahead of emerging trends that threaten their SaaS security—even with genAI in the mix. We believe that overcoming security risks arising from modern data sharing behaviors and genAI in SaaS environments, as well as simplifying SaaS security, requires an updated, modern approach that legacy products can’t solve.
Implementing Modern SaaS Security
Our Netskope One platform, which unifies our market-leading SASE and security service edge (SSE) capabilities, uniquely secures organizations and data from all modern SaaS risks, ensuring the broadest visibility and control of an organization’s entire SaaS estate, including the use of pervasive genAI apps. It also provides the most advanced enterprise data protection as part of a fully converged solution that makes SaaS security management not only more effective, but also undemanding.
Today, we are thrilled to announce more groundbreaking SaaS security innovations to our Netskope One platform, further expanding our industry-leading cloud access security broker (CASB) solution to overcome modern SaaS security challenges.
Key Solution Highlights
Netskope One brings together the industry’s first genAI-powered SaaS security, the industry’s most advanced and context-driven DLP, and the industry’s utmost converged cloud management controls to take your SaaS security to an unprecedented level. Here are some of the key solution highlights:
- Leverage the Power of AI to Automatically Stay Ahead of SaaS Sprawl: The industry’s first genAI-powered SaaS security automatically and precisely categorizes new and previously unseen SaaS apps and their specific risks through genAI-assisted risk scoring. This release also allows the native use of genAI for on-demand risk categorization of novel SaaS applications by security teams based on the needs of their organization. Security teams today can also gain more tailored LLM-driven risk insights for SaaS applications already categorized by simply querying the system in natural language.
- Protect All Your Data with Unmatched Efficacy and Context: Netskope empowers information security teams with the most advanced, context-driven cloud data loss prevention (DLP) solution, covering all the key communication channels, including scanning over 1,800 different file types and leveraging over 3,000 data identifiers. The solution enhances precision with deep learning, AI, natural language processing (NLP), convolutional neural networks, groundbreaking trainable machine learning (ML), and more. In this release, Netskope further expands use cases by leveraging greater contextual awareness through shared risk intelligence across CASB inline, API, and SSPM. As a result, modern types of data exposures are prevented in real time by leveraging SaaS posture risk awareness.
- Attain Maximum Value with Effortless Management and Efficiency: As a unified and automated SaaS security platform, Netskope One is designed to make SaaS security management effortless and undemanding. This is achieved through the native integration of all its components (CASB inline, API, and SSPM), a unified dashboard offering deep visibility into users and privileges, a natively unified policy framework, and ML-driven alert prioritization using risk correlation. The management of the solution is greatly simplified thanks to unified policies and an integrated architecture. Minimized alert fatigue is accomplished through more granular controls and higher accuracy, while frictionless security is ensured by enhancing risk visibility and consolidating policy actions to reduce the impact on user productivity. Additionally, Netskope One offers a single pane of glass for all-in-one cloud security, risk detection, and threat hunting, ensuring superior security and efficiency in managing SaaS environments.
SaaS Security Evolved to Overcome Modern Risks
Netskope One solves the problem of SaaS sprawl and data risks posed by the increased use of SaaS applications in the enterprise work environment. As your organization wrangles with how to secure SaaS and genAI use, consider Netskope One as your holistic solution that uses modern techniques to stay ahead of modern risks.
To learn more, visit our SaaS Security webpage and register for our upcoming webinar Unlocking Modern SaaS Security: Ensuring Data Safety and Compliance in a Hybrid Work Model.
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