IBM announces Cloud Security Enforcer-- a piece of security technology designed for enterprises wanting to safeguard against the trend of "bring your own" cloud-based apps at the workplace.
According to Big Blue, Cloud Security Enforcer is the first product combining cloud identity management (Identity-as-a-Service) with visibility of all 3rd party cloud apps accessed by employees. Hosted on the IBM Cloud, it first scans corporate networks to find the apps used by employees (via "deep threat analytics from IBM X-Force") before providing a more secure means of access.
To do so it adds "security-rich" connectors for a number of popular apps used on the workplace, including Box, Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce.com, in order to bypass security breaches caused by human errors such as weak passwords.
The result is a secure means for employees to access and use the apps they want.
An IBM survey of over 1000 Fortune 1000 companies shows over 30% of employees share and upload corporate data on 3rd party cloud apps, and an increasing number of employees engages in risky practices such as signing in with personal email addresses, weak passwords and re-use of corporate log-in credentials. Meanwhile nearly 40% of mobile apps lack proper security, bringing about further risk.
"Other vendor technology in the market today manages just the discovery of which cloud apps employees are using," the company claims. "IBM Security Cloud Enforcer goes well beyond just discovery-- it actually gives employees a path for using the third-party cloud apps they want as it centrally manages access via secure log-in credentials [...] Previously, companies needed several different technologies to do some of these things. Now, however, they just need one SaaS technology in Cloud Enforcer."
