by Angela Guess

According to a new press release, “Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a leading provider of advanced web security solutions for global enterprises and governments, today released findings of the First Half 2016 Shadow Data Threat Report. The research was conducted and published by Blue Coat Elastica Cloud Threat Labs, and provides a data-science powered analysis of more than 15,000 enterprise cloud apps in use and 108 million enterprise documents stored and shared within them.”

The release continues, “In this edition of the report, we established a risk-based scoring system to determine the business readiness of cloud apps. Using this scale, we analyzed apps for their ability to provide compliance, data protection, security controls and more. Of the 15,000 apps analyzed, it was revealed that 99 percent do not provide sufficient security, compliance controls and features to effectively protect enterprise data in the cloud. Additionally, the report revealed that Shadow Data, unmanaged content employees store and share across cloud apps, continues to remain a major threat, with 23 percent of it being broadly shared among employees and external parties. The report also found that organizations are running 20 times more cloud apps than they estimate, with most using an average of 841 across their extended networks.”

Aditya Sood, PhD and Director of Security and Elastica Cloud Threat Labs at Blue Coat, noted, “The vast majority of business cloud apps we analyzed do not meet enterprise standards for security and can put companies at risk for compromise even though virtually every enterprise uses them… This is troubling when you think about the financial risks faced by enterprises due to insecure or non-compliant apps. Understanding which cloud applications your employees are adopting and using is an important step to identifying which apps are business ready and which apps need to be replaced with more secure alternatives.”

Read more at Marketwired.

Photo credit: Blue Coat