By Ericka Chickowski 1

Cloud security broker Perspecsys is building a full head of steam coming out of last week’s release of new data controls on its platform at the RSA Conference with the announcement yesterday that it’s been granted a key patent for tokenizing data sent back and forth between cloud applications and an intermediary control plane. Perspecsys got the ball rolling with the launch of new Cloud Control capabilities within its Approtex platform, giving organizations greater flexibility in how they grant approval status to cloud services.

The new capabilities make it possible for them to grant access during defined time windows or within certain geographies, as well as from specifically approved systems and devices. Perspecsys also added Cloud DLP features to lock down sensitive data such as social security numbers or credit card numbers from being sent to cloud applications.

“Enterprises need a spectrum of solutions to meet their cloud data control requirements,” says David Canellos, CEO of Perspecsys. “Approtex’s new capabilities complement our existing best-in-class data encryption and tokenization solutions to provide a broad suite of cloud data control and governance capabilities.”

The newly granted patent on those tokenization solution will likely bolster Perspecsys legitimacy in a quickly maturing cloud access security broker (CASB) market. As organizations seek to take advantage of cloud scalability and cost benefits without risking security and compliance gaffes, CASBs like Perspecsys are helping them tightly control data flows and keep sensitive data within only those cloud applications that match the security need of the data type. The addition of tokenization further ups the security ante for data living within cloud environments.

“Tokenization has become the de facto standard for securing sensitive payment card details in the retail sector,” Canellos says. “Perspecsys’ invention enables us to bring tokenization’s strong data protection benefits to all types of sensitive and regulated data across a diverse set of enterprise cloud use cases in healthcare, banking, manufacturing, telecommunications and other regulated industries.”

According to Gartner (IT) last week at the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) at RSA, Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald reported that the CASB market is expected to go from $100 million in spending to $500 million in three years. Gartner reports that the technology will become an essential component of SaaS deployments by 2017.