Maintaining Compliance in the New Era of Cloud Apps and Shadow Data

In the 2H 2015 Shadow Data Report, Elastica Cloud Threat Labs analyzed over 63M documents stored in popular file sharing apps like Office 365 and Box, and found that 26% of them were broadly shared – that is shared broadly within the organization or externally. Of these, 1-in-10 were found to contain compliancerelated data, such as PII, PCI, PHI and source code. With partners, third parties and even employees rushing to deploy cloud apps and services – often without the knowledge or sanction of IT – the risk to companies from compliance violations resulting from the mishandling or leakage of this data will only continue to increase. This paper will discuss cloud compliance regulations, the potential costs and risks of violating them, and the critical steps necessary to ensure cloud data compliance.