Skyhigh Networks Awarded Pioneering CASB Patents for Cloud Security and Cloud Governance

March 16, 2017 Off By David
Grazed from Skyhigh Networks

Skyhigh Networks, the world’s leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), announced today the company has been awarded two new CASB patents for security and governance capabilities. This official recognition follows nearly four years of comprehensive assessment by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, further validating Skyhigh’s risk-based approach to helping customers safely adopt software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services.

The two new patents, ‘Cloud Service Usage Risk Assessment’ and ‘Cloud Service Risk Usage Monitoring System,’ brings Skyhigh’s granted portfolio count to eight, forming the most robust and growing patented technology portfolio in the CASB industry. Previous CASB patents granted to Skyhigh covered cloud-based encryption with enterprise managed keys, increasingly critical for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy regulations; and identity-based, mobile-to-cloud inline security enforcement, critical for any inline CASB use case. A combination of these seminal patents positions Skyhigh as the CASB industry leader covering cloud discovery, compliance, data security and threat protection.

"Cloud is very strategic for our business, and we expect our partners to deliver solutions that both add value to our business AND meet the increasingly complex security challenges in this new era of cloud-distributed 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."

The two new patents are representative of Skyhigh’s significant investment in innovation across its current and future suite of products. Specifically:

  • Cloud Service Usage Risk Assessment (U.S. Patent 9582780) Represented by Skyhigh’s Cloud Risk Registry, this patent 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 the risk attributes of any cloud service and enforce policies such as preventing company data from being uploaded to a cloud service that does not encrypt data at rest or to services whose legal attribute of intellectual property ownership indicates that the service provider owns any IP that is uploaded to the service, etc.
  • Cloud Service Risk Usage Monitoring System (U.S. Patent 9571516) Represented by Skyhigh’s Enterprise Connector and Cloud Analytics Engine, this patent 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 discover including usage analytics and anomaly detection. The patent also includes the ability to discover all SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud services in use and facilitate ongoing communication between Skyhigh’s CASB and existing network infrastructure to monitor for and remediate cloud threats.

"Cloud requires a paradigm shift in how we enforce security controls, and our latest patents represent the foundation of a security platform for the cloud era," said Sekhar Sarukkai, Chief Scientist, Skyhigh. "We made early investments in technology that enables enterprises to operationalize cloud security at scale, and we now have the most mature and innovative patent portfolio in place as the demand for cloud services and cloud security is skyrocketing."