Cloud security and management specialist LogMeIn debuted AppGuru, a cloud app management offering designed to help companies secure employee-introduced applications and IT professionals reclaim control of today’s consumerized IT environments.
AppGuru offers a way for IT pros to gain visibility into employee use of cloud apps, set group or individual policies, and centralize user management across a broad, growing catalog of applications, as the bring-your-own-application (BYOA) trend continues to evolve.
The platform offers support for hundreds of applications, including the ability to detect employee use of apps such as Basecamp, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Apps, join.me, Office 365, SugarSync, Trello, and others.
“For our SMB IT customer base, ‘Shadow IT’ and BYOA are forcing them to rethink the ways they approach device, application and data management. When you consider the fact that the majority of cloud apps are being used without the knowledge of IT, we see this trend as one of the most significant challenges facing IT today,” Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeIn, said in a statement. “Our goal with AppGuru is to give our IT customers complete visibility into and control over their environment in ways that embrace the inherent realities of employee-introduced technology.”
AppGuru’s monitoring capabilities reveal what apps are being used on a company’s network, by whom and on which devices. Pricing starts at $29 per managed user per year.
IT pros then have the ability to determine how best to manage such usage to protect against data leakage and security risks, including the ability to apply policies on who can use such apps and in which ways.
Features include Active Directory sync, which allows IT pros to sync users, groups and departments from AD to AppGuru to manage cloud application access by provisioning or disabling user accounts in AD.
Policy management allows IT to set and enforce individual or group policies that restrict the usage of specific features within cloud apps to mitigate security risks, comply with regulatory requirements and prevent potential data leakage.
In addition, cloud app activity monitoring provides real-time insight into which specific cloud apps are being accessed, by whom, how often and on which devices.
A recent survey conducted by Edge Strategies on behalf of LogMeIn revealed that IT departments grossly underestimate the scope of the BYOA trend in their workplace.
IT pros surveyed estimated the number of BYO apps to be 2.8 apps per organization. However, subsequent data collected from similar-sized organizations via app discovery technology found that the average number of actual BYO apps to be closer to 21 per company–7 times more.