BetterCloud Report Reveals Insider Threats Pose Biggest Security Risk

Survey responses from nearly 500 IT and security professionals highlight need for organizations to expand defenses to include insiders as potential threats to network and data security

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BetterCloud

Mar 20, 2019, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, March 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- BetterCloud, the leading SaaS Operations Management platform, today released its first insider threats report: "State of Insider Threats in the Digital Workplace 2019." The report found that 91 percent of IT and security professionals surveyed feel vulnerable to insider threats, and 75 percent believe the biggest risks lie in cloud applications like popular file storage and email solutions such as Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox and more.

Click here to download the report.

"The rise of SaaS in the digital workplace has made companies more vulnerable than ever to insider threats," said David Politis, Founder and CEO, BetterCloud. "A major reason is SaaS has given users all the control over data within the application and, as a result, IT and security teams have lost control. Another major challenge is the complexity of SaaS application architecture, which makes functions like sharing permissions and configurations difficult to manage. Because SaaS is new territory, companies are unprepared to deal with the security blind spots these challenges create."

For the report, BetterCloud surveyed nearly 500 IT and network security professionals from the world's leading enterprise organizations. The company also looked at its own proprietary product data to shed light on where IT and security professionals are most vulnerable. Among the key findings:

Nearly all of the IT and security professionals surveyed (91 percent) feel vulnerable to insider threats.
62 percent of respondents believe the biggest security threat comes from the well-meaning but negligent end user.
75 percent believe the biggest risks lie in cloud storage and email solutions (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, etc.) and email (e.g., Gmail, Office 365).
46 percent of IT leaders (heads of IT and above) believe that the rise of SaaS applications makes them the most vulnerable.
40 percent of respondents believe they are most vulnerable to exposure of confidential business information (financial information, customer lists).
Only 26 percent of C-level executives say they've invested enough to mitigate the risk of insider threats, versus 44 percent of IT managers.

Politis adds, "Historically, companies have relied on perimeter-based security mechanisms like firewalls and intrusion detection systems to keep data inside company walls, but that paradigm simply doesn't work in the cloud. Our findings make it clear that in order to combat these rising threats, organizations must expand their defenses by monitoring and managing the user and all of their interactions within the application."

To learn more about these growing threats and how to prepare, download the full report from the BetterCloud website.

About BetterCloud
BetterCloud is the first SaaS Operations Management platform, empowering IT and security teams to define, remediate, and enforce management and security policies for SaaS applications. Over 2,500 customers in 60+ countries rely on BetterCloud for continuous event monitoring, quickly remediating threats, and fully-automated policy enforcement. To further guide customers on their SaaS strategy, the company established the first-ever "SaaS Application Management and Security Framework" in its newly published book, Controlling Your SaaS Environment. BetterCloud is headquartered in New York City with an engineering office in Atlanta, GA. For more information, please visit www.bettercloud.com.

SOURCE BetterCloud