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Cloud redefines security

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 28 May 2015

Cloud application control is redefining the secure Web gateway, said Ed Macnair, CEO at CensorNet, speaking at the ITWeb Security Summit 2015 in Midrand, yesterday.

According to Macnair, organisations need visibility into the use of cloud applications to understand the risk they present.

Today's Web security solutions must offer cloud application control capabilities beyond the traditional security functionality, he noted.

"Ensuring the Internet is 'a safe place to be' is far from a new idea but the way in which we need to protect it has changed almost beyond measure."

Originally designed to mainly protect against Web-borne malware, Web security solutions product development has been relatively static; the world has gone mobile but security has not changed, said Macnair.

He noted protection against malware is still valid but controlling user access to cloud applications, on any device, and from any location at any time of day, is now imperative.

Much of the Web security market has seen no real product developments since the early 2000s, said Macnair. Those solutions were developed before the era of Facebook and the vast number of cloud applications that are used in business today, he added.

"We classified Web sites in the late 1990s - now we need to classify cloud apps."

The rise of cloud applications in the workplace is driving the need to extend security policies to all devices and manage access to cloud applications, said MacNair. About 69% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their computing infrastructure in the cloud, he added.

Gartner predicts, by 2016, 25% of enterprises will secure access to cloud-based services using a cloud access security broker platform, reducing the cost of securing access by 30% in the process.

Other research by Radicati expects the worldwide corporate Web security market to grow from more than $1.7 billion in 2014 to upwards of $2.7 billion in 2018.

As more employees use personally owned devices to access, process and store corporate data, the ease of deploying cloud applications has increased unauthorised applications to process corporate data, said MacNair.

Business now needs greater visibility and control of enterprise data in the cloud that is accessed using both managed and unmanaged devices, he added.

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