Evalueserve looks to Netskope

Sachin Jain Evaluereserve

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Established in 2000, Evalueserve is a leading global provider of solutions and services for research, analytics and data management. The company has more than 500 customers in multiple industries, including financial services, manufacturing, IT and healthcare.

Evalueserve’s adoption of cloud has enabled its own digital transformation while also ensuring continuous access to mission-critical information for its customers.

Sachin Jain, CIO and CISO at Evalueserve, has been instrumental in the company's migration to a cloud-first architecture. “Cloud-first is not a bottom-up decision,” Jain says. “It comes from the top down with all teams involved – networking, security, application support, risk and compliance – to make the transition a success.”

The adoption of Microsoft Office 365 across the company was part of Evalueserve’s digital transformation strategy and allowed the organisation to optimise processes and engage team members, partners and clients. Evalueserve brought in Netskope to add an additional layer of protection for its sensitive data in Office 365. By sharing responsibility and taking a holistic security approach with Netskope, Evalueserve can now quickly identify and close security gaps, minimise potential risks and ensure a secure path to the cloud.

Challenges

·       Incomplete visibility

·       Risk of sensitive data loss and non-compliance

·       Limited DLP capabilities

Solutions

·       Netskope for Office 365

·       Netskope Data Loss Prevention

·       Netskope Threat Protection

Benefits

·       Risk mitigation

·       More robust DLP, threat protection and policy enforcement capabilities for O365

·       GDPR compliance

Comprehensive data loss prevention and threat protection for Office 365

For Evalueserve, Netskope fills critical gaps in Microsoft’s existing DLP features across the Office 365 suite and other cloud services too. “With Netskope, we prevent our sensitive data from leaking in and out of Office 365 – and it’s not limited to just OneDrive and Sharepoint –Netskope’s DLP inspects dozens of apps in the Office 365 ecosystem,” says Jain. 

Evalueserve, like many organisations, has sensitive data that needs identifying and protecting, but without the risk of false-positives or false-negatives associated with predefined DLP profiles and traditional DLP capabilities. Netskope secures sensitive data with advanced DLP features like Exact Data Match, fingerprinting of files, support for custom keywords and RegEx with weighed dictionaries, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and more. Jain says: “We found that Netskope provides the most enterprise-ready cloud DLP in the market for securing sensitive data across our cloud environment.”

Cloud threats like malware and ransomware are also of concern for Evalueserve’s IT department. “With Netskope, we can defend against and remediate malware in Office 365,” Jain says.

Securing Office 365 with Netskope

As Office 365 usage increased across Evalueserve, it became a priority to ensure corporate data was protected by implementing new and robust tools for security and compliance. “Because cloud apps like Office 365 move information outside of the traditional corporate perimeter, security practices that worked in our on-premises environment no longer hold up,” says Jain.

With Office 365, Evalueserve employees have access to office programs on all their devices. They use OneDrive to store and share documents from any device and Teams to chat, share documents and more. “With just a few clicks, an employee can share an entire folder containing sensitive data with another user within the company or outside the company in violation of a compliance regulation,” says Jain.

Evalueserve’s adoption of Netskope fulfils Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, where Microsoft will take care of platform security (ie, security of the cloud) while the Office 365 customer is responsible for the safe and compliant use of the Office 365 applications (ie, security in the cloud).

After implementing Netskope, Evalueserve is able to discover all of the cloud services in use across their organisation; from detailed user activities to securing application usage by enforcing granular policies.

Evalueserve’s cloud policies include: Don’t let users inside the company share confidential documents with people outside of the company and alert security teams if users download content from SharePoint or OneDrive while on a mobile or unmanaged device. “Netskope sits between our end-users and Microsoft Office 365, looks at all the applications, data and activity, and applies the right controls to it,” says Jain.

Real results

Using Netskope, Evalueserve has been able to safely enable Office 365 and secure personal data for GDPR cloud compliance. “Not only can we discover our sensitive data, we take actions to protect our data, like raising an alert, removing any public sharing, or deleting the data,” explains Jain. Netskope allows for DLP policies to be set across Evalueserve’s entire Office 365 ecosystem, not only just SharePoint Sites, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook, but also services like Teams, Power BI and more.

“With workers relying on so many cloud services and accessing them from different locations and different devices, ensuring alignment with GDPR requires new security tools. Using Netskope, we enforce real-time policies using DLP for all of our cloud services. This helps us prevent users from performing risky actions and mitigates risk of GDPR data breaches,” says Jain.

Looking forward

Today Evalueserve relies on Netskope to ensure secure and compliant usage for the Office 365 suite of applications. Security is an ever evolving domain with a dynamic threat landscape. Threat vectors, risks and types of attacks are changing with the time. “Netskope helps us stay ahead of security threats and gives us the confidence that we have complete control over where our data is and where it’s going. The Netskope Platform gives us a comprehensive all-mode deployment architecture to support our growing needs that will extend beyond Office.

“The Netskope Platform gives us a comprehensive all-mode deployment architecture to support our growing needs that will extend beyond Office 365 to govern usage of other SaaS, IaaS and web services,” says Jain.