Skyhigh Networks has announced expansion into the Asia Pacific Region with the launch of a data center and regional office in Sydney, Australia. Skyhigh’s in-country presence was in direct response to growing demand from enterprises in Australia and New Zealand seeking to not only understand the use and risk of “shadow IT,” but also to proactively embrace cloud services such as Box, Office 365, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow while complying with their strict data privacy regulations.

 “Since their emergence in 2012, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) have grown in importance and today are the primary technical means of giving organizations more control over SaaS security. This technology will become an essential component of SaaS deployments by 2017,” notes Gartner, Inc. in Emerging Technology Analysis: Cloud Access Security Brokers, Sid Deshpande, Neil MacDonald, Craig Lawson, September 25, 2014. Skyhigh Networks helped define the CASB category and is the only solution provider with a range of products supporting the entire cloud adoption lifecycle of Discover, Analyze, and Secure.

Specifically, Skyhigh Discover shines a light on Shadow IT by giving the organization a comprehensive view into its use of all cloud services. For each cloud service in use, Skyhigh delivers an objective risk assessment derived from over 50 attributes for each service to quickly identify data, business and legal risks of these services.

Skyhigh Analyze evaluates the use of all cloud services to identify opportunities for IT to enable employees by subscribing to specific cloud services, to reduce risk and costs by consolidating and better managing subscriptions, and to highlight anomalous behavior that may indicate a security breach, data leak, or compliance violation.

Skyhigh Secure enforces the organization's policies across all cloud services via coarse and granular access control, encrypting sensitive data with customer managed keys, data loss prevention, and providing a live log of all accesses and actions for forensic and compliance purposes.

"Until recently, enterprise IT had few scalable options to allow the business to freely adopt SaaS applications while applying external security controls to reduce the risk associated with these deployments,” said Craig Lawson and Sid Deshpande of Gartner Research in Mind the SaaS Security Gaps, published October 3, 2014. "The emergence of CASB is an opportunity for enterprise security leaders to take the lead and be the "yes, and here's how" leaders within an organization."

Skyhigh Networks has received ISO27001 certification and all Skyhigh global datacenters are located within Tier-1 Equinix facilities. With the local datacenter in Sydney, Skyhigh can help Australian government agencies move forward with their Cloud First Policy without violating local data privacy regulations. Additionally, regional enterprises can take advantage of cloud services while protecting end-user information to comply with local data privacy regulations. Financial Services organizations can take advantage of cloud services and meet the guidelines recommended by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

“As employees across the globe embrace the cloud, organizations look for a service that delivers comprehensive visibility, usage analytics and policy enforcement,” said Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh Networks. “With the industry’s most robust, effective, and easy-to-consume cloud security offering and datacenters worldwide, we enable organizations in any country to securely adopt cloud services while complying with their data residency requirements.”