When Brian Lillie, Chief Information Officer of datacenter company Equinix, asked employees what technology they used, it wasn’t limited to the software provided by IT. “People were using Dropbox, Evernote, a whole range of cloud services with varying levels of risk. We knew we had to get a handle on everything.”

1. Cloud Access Security Market Expected to Reach 25% of Companies by
2016
When Brian Lillie, Chief Information Officer of datacenter company Equinix, asked
employees what technology they used, it wasn’t limited to the software provided by IT.
“People were using Dropbox, Evernote, a whole range of cloud services with varying
levels of risk. We knew we had to get a handle on everything.”
The company eventually purchased a solution that allows them visibility into all the
cloud services people are using in order to shepherd them to lower-risk services.
Information technology analyst firm Gartner defines the market as Cloud Access
Security Brokers, including solutions that discover all services in use, assess their risk,
and provide security tools.
According to Gartner, by 2016 it’s expected that one out of every four enterprises will
use a CASB solution, up from just 1% in 2012. They project the use of cloud access
security brokers will reduce the cost of securing cloud access by as much as 30% for the
average company. That’s a substantial amount of money since many large enterprises
spend millions of dollars each year on securing their data.
As more employees bring an increasing number of cloud services to work, and install
them on devices brought to work, known as bring your own device or BYOD, many in IT
are signaling this next wave as the bring your own cloud or BYOC era. Cloud Access
Security aims to protect data across a vast array of thousands of different cloud services,
all with differing security controls and policies.
For Brian Lillie, it’s clear IT must work with the business to enable the safe adoption of
cloud. “IT lives to serve the business, not the other way around. We’re the chief enabler
of the business.” Within Equinix, some people have started calling Lillie the Chief
Enablement Officer. It’s a riff on the job title Chief Information Officer, signaling IT is
more about information today, it’s about enabling business value.