Cyber Defense eMagazine May Edition for 2022

These solutions work well for primary data stores. However, as companies use more cloud services, rich
corporate data becomes more dispersed across different platforms and cloud service providers. Since
each platform has its own unique reporting APIs, where enterprises utilize a mix of different platforms,
messaging, customer relationship management (CRM) and financial systems, I believe using a thirdparty
cloud security tool is no longer sufficient.
I have come to the conclusion that no third-party tool has APIs for all the cloud platforms available. In
fact, it is probably not even possible to develop such a tool in a practical sense. Even if there were only
one could, it would be a foolhardy task as the frequency of API changes alone can be challenging for
even one or two platforms.
Get the Same Level of User Oversight you had on the LAN via the Browser
Nearly every current cloud platform shares one thing in common: they’re accessed through the
browser. While they may sit in thousands of locations and have tens of thousands of APIs, access to data
happens through the browser for the vast majority of enterprise users. The key is to make the browser
environment act like it was permanently on the ‘LAN’.
As a starting point, let us take a closer look at the advantages the browser offers as a tool for accessing
data. Browsers significantly reduce the attack surface and tend to be more secure than PC applications
in general. PCs present multiple opportunities to access local data and to network to other nodes, once
compromised. The browser, on the other hand, presents some kind of a wall that needs to be jumped to
get to the cloud data, particularly when access is protected with 2FA (Two Factor Authentication).
Keyboard scraping is easy, so passwords are practically redundant as a means of protection.
To give enterprises the same level of LAN protection and oversight in the cloud, the approach we take at
GAT Labs, for instance, is to protect the USER in the browser environment. In effect, we get the browser
to act as if it were on the enterprise’s private LAN.
Developing for the browser has many advantages. Apart from the reduced number of platforms you have
to develop for ‘real time’, protection can be achieved, something even APIs don’t offer.
Monitoring what happens in the active tab allows us to alert on or block important data like company
credit card or bank account numbers in real time, except on allowed sites. This, in turn, improves your
enterprise’s data loss prevention (DLP) in the cloud. It has the added advantage of being able to account
for all your users time in the browser. This greatly improves capacity planning and productivity reporting.
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