Introducing BetterCloud Platform APIs: Secure User Interactions Across All of Your Cloud Applications

BetterCloud was born out of a need to secure critical business data in the cloud. We started in 2011 by focusing on the security and management challenges with Google. In 2016, we expanded to support additional mission-critical SaaS applications, including Slack, Dropbox, and Salesforce. In the last year, our platform monitored over 170 billion events, identified 550 million public files, and automated 2 billion actions — saving companies 67,000 hours of manual work.

And today we’ve taken the next step in improving application management and security by announcing the launch of the BetterCloud Platform APIs: the only platform to monitor user interactions and remediate policy violations across all of your cloud applications.

The BetterCloud Platform APIs deliver the much-needed control to automate management workflows and security policies across any cloud technology. They extend the capabilities of our existing platform to all of the applications that power your business and add new capabilities for script creation, collaboration, and security.

A new security paradigm

Enterprises today face a major data security crisis. The traditional perimeter-based security paradigm that once kept a company’s information assets safe from outside threats simply doesn’t work in the cloud. Employees now connect to internal and external networks from anywhere and via an astonishing number of cloud-based applications. This phenomenon has rendered the notion of a defensible barrier or device a fallacy and has given rise to a new perimeter: the user.

Enterprises now realize the only way to secure their business-critical data is to follow the user and their interactions at the application level. Users have billions of interactions a day with their own data, other trusted users’ data, and users outside of the organization. These interactions range from accessing files to changing group sharing settings or becoming an administrator of an application. Most organizations assume their users are acting in their best interest, but over 50% of breaches involve an insider component and 44% of those were due to negligent behavior.

With billions of interactions occurring every day in an enterprise’s environment, it’s impossible for IT and security teams to identify the risky interactions and automatically reverse suspicious activity as it occurs, such as pulling back a confidential file that is shared externally or reverting a public group to private. Software programs that monitor suspicious activity create a backlog of user events to review, keeping user’s data in quarantine until the requested activity is manually verified as safe. These requests bog down security teams with false positives and mundane, manual review cycles that are unproductive for IT and security teams as well as the user.

Introducing the BetterCloud Platform API

The Platform API was specifically developed to address this gap in security across enterprise-level organizations. Using BetterCloud, IT and security professionals can build hyper-focused policies to remediate issues on targeted events and users across any cloud technologies. Rather than attacking policy violations with a blunt-forced approach, IT and security teams can build granular policies that only revert settings on specified users and activities. This approach enables the entire business by ensuring users have access to do the tasks needed, while remaining secure.

One of our customers who joined our Platform API beta program said:

“We are always pushing to buy versus build, but BetterCloud and the Platform API lets us do both safely.”

The Platform APIs also give teams the flexibility of scripting, while leveraging BetterCloud’s security controls for complete governance and security. The new Scripting Platform serves as a central library for all application-related scripts in your environment where developers can collaborate on scripts in a safe and secure way. IT and security users with zero coding experience can then leverage these scripts as part of comprehensive workflows and policies. BetterCloud’s security features — including Role-Based Privileges and Audit Logs — extend to the scripting platform, giving teams the ability to limit access to the appropriate users and track all of the actions taken by a script.

By connecting disparate systems and triggering multi-step automation processes, the Platform APIs enhance enterprises’ ROI on existing management and security systems of record. Teams can now automatically share log data with Splunk to maintain a complete log of user and admin interactions, create tickets in ServiceNow as part of an end-to-end policy, or leverage alerts from one application (such as a vulnerable device alert in AirWatch) to trigger a policy in another application. Creating custom policies with these applications improves system integrations and automates historically manual tasks across tools, ensuring proper security across all of your systems.

New features

BetterCloud has long been a central tool for management workflows and security policies for over 2,500 companies, but this new functionality enables companies to extend their policies to all of the applications that power their business.

The new components include:

• A Scripting Platform that creates a centralized scripting library with robust security controls.
• Trigger Inputs to enable teams to kick off security policies and management workflows from a specific event, such as an alert from a SIEM provider, ticket from an ITSM or helpdesk system, or new hire notification from an HRIS.
• Action Extensions to enable IT and security teams to take admin actions in other applications, including deleting licenses, changing entitlements, creating tickets, or sending audit logs to a SIEM provider.
• Graph API that allows customers to ingest and analyze cross-application data uniquely collected in BetterCloud to identify security trends and report on the metrics that matter to them.

Available today

The Platform APIs are available for all Enterprise customers starting today. Please speak with your Customer Success Manager to schedule a demonstration.

Not on BetterCloud yet? Request a demo today to learn more about how BetterCloud and the new Platform APIs centralize and enrich your SaaS data, enforce management and security policies, and increase ROI of other systems.