Hey, you, get out of my cloud : cloud and threat report, July 2021 edition

This report makes our fifth edition focusing on cloud data risks and threats, and the trends are becoming more apparent. Digital transformation continues with enterprise cloud app adoption up 22% during the first half of this year, compared to a 12% increase during the first half of 2020. 97% of cloud apps used in the enterprise are shadow IT, unmanaged and often freely adopted by business units and users. Personal app usage continues to present a data security challenge, as departing users upload sensitive data to personal app instances ahead of their departure. At the same time, third-party app plugins present a hidden data risk for managed cloud apps, and exposed cloud workloads provide attackers possible infiltration vectors. Attacker cloud adoption also continues, with attackers increasingly hosting malware payloads in cloud apps and using malicious Office documents to gain initial footholds. If one topic stands out in our fifth edition, it is that a Pandora’s box of personal app instances is a target destination for data movement and exfiltration. While the findings are concerning, the ability to decode and analyze apps and cloud services inline, including company and personal instances of popular Software-as-a-Service (Saas) apps, shadow IT, and public cloud services is the building block to these findings. Netskope Threat Labs research is built upon this broad visibility and rich metadata. Your security stack should have the same visibility and control to reduce these data risks and threats.