Collaboration cloud services lead to a rise in data violations

Almost 10 percent of data loss prevention (DLP) violations come from collaboration services according to a new report.

The study from cloud security company Netskope shows that as cloud services like HipChat and Slack have increased in popularity enterprises need to put policies in place to protect the information that’s shared.

"Collaboration services are quickly displacing more traditional ways of communication and collaboration like email, and with that means that more data is being shared inside of those services," says Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO, Netskope. "It's critical that organizations implement solutions that afford real-time visibility and control, data loss prevention, and threat protection for these services and the many ecosystem services they connect to to ensure that collaboration is not hindered and their sensitive data remains secure."

Webmail remains the leader in DLP violations, accounting for 43.3 percent. Cloud storage comes in at second with 30.6 percent and other cloud service categories combined to make up 16.3 percent. Looking at DLP violations by activity, uploads make up the majority at 65 percent, followed by sending at 17.5 percent and downloading at 16.2 percent.

The report also shows that many cloud services are still not fully prepared for the impact of GDPR. 66.9 percent of cloud services don't specify that the customer owns the data in their terms of service, 89.9 percent don't support encryption of data at rest, and 40.7 percent of cloud services replicate data in geographically dispersed data centers.

The average number of cloud services per enterprise was 1,053, a slight decrease from 1,071 in the last quarter. For the first time, the manufacturing industry has the highest average amount of cloud services used, at 1,222 this quarter. Retail, restaurants, and hospitality have fallen to second place with 1,131. Financial services, banking, and insurance follow at 1,039, with healthcare and life sciences, and technology and IT services coming in at 1,014 and 821, respectively.

You can find out more in the Netskope Cloud Report which is available from the company's website.

Photo Credit: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock