Early Vibe: Skyhigh Networks

I was very impressed with this year’s RSA Conference – not only was the energy level of 24,000 attendees up over previous years, but I also witnessed more innovation on the exhibition floor than I had seen for a very long time. One of the companies I enjoyed talking with, thanks to a tip from my friend Rich B., was Skyhigh Networks. Skyhigh launched on the Monday of RSA so they get the prize for my earliest Early Vibe ever!

Skyhigh offers a subscription service based on firewall logs to identify cloud services accessed from within the network. Most companies have no visibility, and thus no control, over the cloud applications users access from within the corporate network. I find IT usually knows personal use of email, social sites, and data storage is happening, but IT is often stunned when they learn the magnitude of the usage. And of course, there are always the security benefits of detecting use of unauthorized applications, checking out security reputations of applications that are used for the first time, planning training needs for secure use of cloud apps, and prioritizing heavily used applications for renewal negotiations.

My understanding of how it works is firewall log data is delivered up through the cloud, where Skyhigh matches addresses with domains and applications within domains (e.g. granularity for Salesforce or Facebook apps), and security gets a lovely dashboard of cloud application usage patterns. Skyhigh has a cool idea to offer analysis of cloud applications and user behavior as a service that gives Skyhigh a ton of flexibility to deliver new security applications.