Natural Intelligence is an Israeli internet company that operates comparison websites such as top10.com and bestmoney.com and works in the space of intent marketing. The company specializes in user acquisition, especially via paid search, and has comparison listings in a variety of topics in fields such as personal finance, business solutions and consumer services.
Natural Intelligence relied on a number of different applications such as Github, Google Drive, BambooHR and Slack to enable productivity, foster collaboration and manage their workforce. Their IT team was initially challenged with having to tightly manage the access to the different Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that were critical in driving business enablement. The team was concerned about loss of control over how their users were interacting with sensitive company data (i.e. accessing, manipulating, and sharing) – both internally and externally with 3rd party vendors.
Additionally, they lacked visibility into how each individual user was interacting with SaaS application data and files. Existing security tools were not able to remediate the threat of data exfiltration at scale, which meant addressing this problem would have to be done via a manual process. Reviewing access entitlements and file shares within each individual application was both labor intensive and did not provide the true scope of the challenge that’s introduced with data overexposure.
National Intelligence’s business was growing, and as a result they had hundreds of employees that were interacting with thousands of different personas such as external collaborators, customers, prospects, vendors, and partners. There were then thousands of SaaS events taking place on a daily basis, throughout all the disparate applications being leveraged; making it nearly impossible to identify activities that presented high risk to the business. Differentiating what was a material threat versus what was normal business practice was a risk that they were unable to solve for.
“As a completely event-driven platform, the DoControl solution enabled us to trigger automated secure workflows, for every user and identity leverage our critical SaaS applications. Having the ability to centrally enforce data access policies was key to reducing the threat of data exfiltration and breaches.” - Eli Rappaport, Head of Information Security, Natural Intelligence
Eli Rappaport, Head of Information Security, Natural Intelligence
The DoControl solution was able to provide visibility, monitoring and risk remediation throughout Natural Intelligence’s critical SaaS applications. DoControl ran an initial query to identify anomalous activity on their Google Drive instance, which identified over 100+ incidents whereby users downloaded or shared data more than 10 times what was their average daily activity. What was more concerning was that the majority of those users were categorized as high-risk users by Natural Intelligence. The DoControl solution initially provided Natural Intelligence with strong visibility and asset management throughout their SaaS environment. They now had full insight into every individual (both internal users and external collaborators) and SaaS events that have been executed. Through self-service remediation, the IT team could now take immediate action on high risk activities such as revoking access or changing ownership over sensitive files.
The IT team was now enabled to enforce granular data access control policies across all the different applications being utilized. For example, if there were an employment status change and an employee had resigned from the company, Natural Intelligence could revoke unnecessary access to specific applications or files to prevent the employee from exfiltrating sensitive information. For their developers managing source code on GitHub, DoControl now provided preventative controls to automatically disallow source code being inadvertently uploaded into a public repository. Secure workflows like providing file sharing to a third party for a predetermined amount of time for a specific project, and then revoking access automatically prevented sensitive data from being overexposed and accessed from anywhere, and at any time.
The DoControl solution has enabled Natural Intelligence’s SaaS data to be automatically monitored and protected against malicious activity, ensuring that no unauthorized user has access to sensitive company data. As a completely agent-less solution, with no software installation necessary, DoControl was implemented quickly and provided immediate time to value. Access reviews were now performed from a centralized location, providing a deep audit trail of end user access activity throughout all the disparate applications being utilized. Natural Intelligence’s IT team can now securely and effectively manage access for every identity, application, and asset being leveraged to drive their business forward.
This stat comes from the industry report we published earlier this year: The SaaS Security Threat Landscape Report. It’s a great read. We recommend you check it out.
