The number of attack vectors cybercriminals can abuse to infiltrate your network grows by the day. The challenge is exasperated when you introduce approved third-party cloud applications, not to mention the untold number of shadow IT apps being used inside an organization.

It’s a fast-evolving vulnerability gap that requires proven cloud application security solutions. To expand on the subject, SonicWall senior product manager Shannon Emmons joined Bill Murphy on his latest RedZone Podcast, “Cloud Application Security Is Your Gateway to Cloud Confidence.”

Murphy and Emmons address why default SaaS application security controls are simply not enough, regaining visibility and control of your SaaS email and apps while taking a wholistic approach, how to protect account takeovers from insider threats and compromised credentials and more.

“As customers make their migration to cloud, security is often an afterthought,” said Emmons. “Particularly when you look at things like Box, Dropbox or some ad hoc ‘app of the day’, somebody needed it at that point of time and now they’ve used it. Your IT staff may know, or they may not know, and you now may have company data out there you don’t know about that’s now at risk of breach or data exfiltration.”

CIOs are challenged to choose a SaaS platform or service that secures Office 365, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, G-suite, Salesforce and more in order to properly protect data leaving their organization and stored within the cloud.

“If you’re using multiple SaaS apps — something like the Office 365 suite, Box or Dropbox and eventually Slack and Salesforce — in most cases organizations are managing those policies, that data and threat space differently,” she said. “Some people assume that the cloud service providers are responsible for protecting them from threats, but they’re not and they’ll call it out in their contracts. It’s never in big, red print.”

Murphy is a world-renowned IT security expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. A prolific thinker and communicator, Murphy publishes educational articles, podcasts and innovative ideas regularly in the RedZone Technologies blog, and hosts the long-running CIO Innovation Forum Community, which helps IT executives share expertise with peers, build professional relationships, learn about new developments and expand leadership skills.