The High Risk of Third-Party Apps- Valutrics

The cloud, combined with an explosion of third-party cloud apps, is posing major security issues for enterprises, according to a new study. The report, “The Explosion of Apps: 27% Are Risky,” was conducted by the cyber-lab of CloudLock, a security vendor. “The shift to the cloud creates a new, virtual security perimeter that includes third-party apps granted access to corporate systems,” said CloudLock Director of Customer Insights and Analytics Ayse Kaya Firat. “Today, most employees leverage a wide variety of apps to get their jobs done efficiently, unwittingly exposing corporate data and systems to malware and the possibility of data theft.” As more organizations adopt cloud platforms and depend on connected third-party apps, it’s important to closely monitor them because they have programmatic API access to corporate data. By extension, app vendors can view, delete, externalize and store corporate data. The report is based on an analysis of 10 million users, 1 billion files, and 160,000 unique applications. The report names the top 10 riskiest apps, the top 10 banned apps and the top 10 trusted apps and offers recommendations on how to securely manage third-party applications.