Skyhigh recently extended its lead in the cloud security innovation race with the issuance of two seminal new patents covering Skyhigh’s cloud governance solution. This official recognition by The United States Patent and Trademark Office follows nearly four years of comprehensive assessment and validates Skyhigh’s unique risk-based approach to cloud governance across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

The two patents, ‘Cloud Service Usage Risk Assessment’ and ‘Cloud Service Risk Usage Monitoring System,’ bring Skyhigh’s granted portfolio count to eight, cementing Skyhigh’s status as the innovation leader in the CASB industry.

What do the patents cover?

Cloud Service Usage Risk Assessment (U.S. Patent 9582780): This patent is for Skyhigh’s Cloud Risk Registry and highlights Skyhigh’s focus on reducing the time and cost involved with scaling growing business’ cloud security needs. The patent covers the ability for companies to automate risk evaluation, threat monitoring, and policy enforcement across thousands of cloud services. It also covers a multi-sourced intelligence of cloud applications, with dynamic risk scores based on a range of important attributes, and the ability to enforce controls based on these attributes.

Previously, companies would spend many weeks and tens of thousands of dollars to evaluate the security posture of a single cloud service. With this patented continuous Cloud Risk monitoring, a company now can instantly view all of the risk attributes of any cloud service and enforce policies like preventing company data from being uploaded to high-risk cloud services, such as those that do not encrypt data at rest or those with legal terms and conditions stating that they own any IP that is uploaded to the service.

Cloud Service Risk Usage Monitoring System (U.S. Patent 9571516): This patent is for Skyhigh’s Enterprise Connector and Cloud Analytics Engine and highlights Skyhigh’s breakthrough approach that balances the benefits of a cloud-based security platform with customers’ needs for data privacy and data protection.

The patent covers the technology that tokenizes sensitive customer data before uploading log events to the cloud-based analytics platform for shadow-IT discovery, including usage analytics and anomaly detection. The patent also includes the ability to discover all SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud services in use and facilitates ongoing communication between Skyhigh’s CASB and existing network infrastructure to monitor for and remediate cloud threats.

How does the technology improve cloud security practices?

Before the advent of CASBs, organizations had very limited visibility and control over the cloud services in use across their employees. Acceptable use policies were merely paper policies with no comprehensive means of enforcement. Skyhigh’s Cloud Risk Usage Monitoring System provides the world’s largest and most accurate registry of cloud services, including thousands of services uncategorized by firewalls and proxies. Every service in the registry comes with a detailed security and compliance risk evaluation featuring over 50 detailed attributes. With access to Skyhigh’s registry of cloud applications and risk data, the IT Security organization can now automate risk evaluation, threat monitoring, and policy enforcement across thousands of cloud services. Customers can customize risk ratings via dynamic risk scores based on a range of important attributes.

The process to evaluate the security posture of a single cloud service now takes minutes with Skyhigh’s risk cloud registry. And, most importantly, customers can enforce their risk-based governance policies based on these attributes in real-time with Skyhigh’s automated closed-loop remediation with existing firewalls and proxies.

Skyhigh’s Cloud Service Risk Usage Monitoring System provides the benefits of a cloud-based security platform in usability and scale while simultaneously catering to a business’ needs for data privacy and data protection. With this technology, Skyhigh can filter and compress log data for performance and tokenize sensitive customer data before uploading it to the cloud-based analytics platform for data security and privacy.

What’s the impact to the business?

According to Gartner, “Enterprises that implement appropriate cloud visibility and control tools will experience one-third fewer security failures.” By implementing these groundbreaking technologies, customers gain the visibility and control required to put actionable cloud governance policies into place to prevent security failures.

“Cloud is very strategic for our business and we expect the vendors we partner with to deliver pioneering and battle-tested solutions for the increasingly complex security challenges in this new era of IT,” said Brian Lillie, Chief Customer Officer and EVP Technology Services, Equinix. “CASB is a key solution in our company’s cloud security stack, and Skyhigh’s patented technologies give us the confidence to enforce cloud security and cloud governance at scale.”