Cloud Security Startup CloudCodes is Securing Enterprises Cloud storage is convenient and efficient, but this startup is ensuring its secure too
By Rustam Singh
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Cloud applications are paving the way for a future that's clutter free, uses much lesser resources and has assisted support for newbie's to learn. Given their several game changing advantages, their adoption is on rise among the enterprises. However, there is no single universal cloud application that will work for every need of an enterprise. Based on the functional objective of enterprise, various cloud based applications are adopted such Zoho/SalesForce for CRM, Google for Work/Office365 for messaging, Marketo for marketing and so on. Each of the cloud application hosts the cloud applications and serves the customers across in the world in a multi-tenant manner. This means enterprises have no control over which user accesses this information outside office premises or on days you don't want to give them access. The cloud application provider responsibilities are to ensure physical infrastructure on which the application is hosted is scalable, robust and secure. The data within the cloud belongs to the customer and it is customer responsibility to ensure the data is secure and safe.
Cloud's Biggest advantage is its bane itself
The biggest advantage of cloud is the ease of access to the application from any remote location that has an internet connection with any device at any time. However, sometimes this can also be a disadvantageous to businesses, and many cloud applications have taken care of this by providing some of the controls to users and operators. However, since the final management all these controls across applications are a challenge for the IT security, the IT Security requires a unified central command to manage the security of all cloud applications. This brings CloudCodes SSO1 to the table. You don't want one employee to gain access to work from home or outside office hours to gain an advantage from his/her peers – not only would be unethical but also illegal.
It is very important to emphasize even though the data is stored with respective cloud applications the responsibility to secure the data is with the custodian of the data i.e. the customer itself. The customer need to ensure the access to the data which is not within their physical boundary follows the regulations and compliance guidelines of their country as well as their business
CloudCodes SSO1 As A Solution
CloudCodes SSO1 provides enterprises a simple and unified way to secure web access to all their cloud applications. Organizations can be small or big but either for security reasons or compliance they need to ensure that the cloud applications adopted by them can be accessed by only the intended users. The solution is built incrementally and is driven by its customers. Each of these features is pain points of organizations who have adopted cloud applications to improve efficiency and increase productivity.
The customers from the Asian countries were concerned about the fact that cloud applications can be accessed from any location and in terms of a hack could be exploited by anyone having access to servers. This was becoming a serious roadblock for adopting cloud. Hiral Pancholi, Director of Projects in Swastik TechnoPack in India was one of such customer who was feeling the pain about accessing organisation data from unknown and unprotected location. With CloudCodes SSO1 they were able to restrict their employees to access their data only from their branch offices using IP restriction. Hiral said, "CloudCodes SSO1 gave me peace of mind". The story is same for almost all their Asian customers.
As per Brazilian Federal Constitution an employee restricts working hours to eight hours a day and 44 hours a week. The rules applies to people who work in continuous rotating shifts, telephone operators, bank workers, artists, air service employees, some apprentices, lawyers, physiotherapists, journalists, dentists, radio broadcasters, teachers and virtually everyone except management positions. This has brought a huge challenge for enterprises who are adopting cloud. With CloudCodes SSO1 time restriction feature which allows employees to login within their shift time and forcibiliy log them out when days hours elapsed. This ensure organisation can mandate the stringent labour laws without compromising on going cloud.
How does cloud management really help organizations at the ground level?
Take the case of a leading financial institution in India planning to adopt Google for Work as their cloud based messaging platform. They were looking for binding a user's device to Google For Work account. Google For Work doesn't have this feature so they choose CloudCodes SSO1 instead which allowed them to bind the user with their desktop/laptop MAC ID to restrict working outside the physical proximity and timing of their job.
CloudCodes SSO1 is cloud security solution developed based on the challenges faced by enterprises when adopting cloud. It uses Single Sign On (SSO) technology to provide all the security features. The roadmap of SSO1 includes supporting more cloud applications such Office 365 and providing DLP and CASB features as part of its offerings.