What’s worse, traditional security technologies don’t provide access to those applications.

It’s a conversation that Trustmarque, a solution provider based in the north of England, frequently has with its customers in the public and private sectors, including business executives who often are completely oblivious to their companies’ complete SaaS usage, said Graham Spivey, director of Trustmarque’s cloud practice.

“Instead of going out and trying to sell cloud as a concept, it’s better to go out and help our customers and prospects to understand what they’re actually doing in the cloud. It’s a different discussion if we’re talking to them and saying here’s a view of everything your company is consuming in the cloud as far as storage, CRM, marketing and other applications,” Spivey said.

Trustmarque hired Spivey with the specific goal of expanding its cloud practice, and he immediately implemented a strategy to help customers understand what actually was going on in their clouds through usage and risk analysis. For that reason, one of the first orders of business upon joining the solution provider was identifying a cloud-discovery tool.

The company commercially tested several such products, and Netskope “came out on top on all fronts,” Spivey said.

Trustmarque appreciated the breadth of Netskope’s service, which Spivey described as going well beyond analytics by enabling policing of the network through tools that enforce policy and prevent data loss.

“We’re talking about empowering safe cloud usage in your business,” he said.

Netskope figures from some early engagements have revealed that Trustmarque clients are, on average, running 10 times the number of applications than their IT directors had thought.

“If businesses thinks they have 40 applications in the cloud, we’re typically finding 400 or more,” Spivey said.

Those numbers don’t surprise Netskope’s CEO. And he doesn’t think they should cause undue alarm.

“We don’t want to stop people from using these apps. We developed Netskope to say, ‘hey, use them, now you can use them with the right governance,’” Beri said.