Patent ID: 9692759
Date: 2017-06-27
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of controlling access to cloud applications, the method comprising: receiving network traffic between a cloud application client and a cloud application being accessed by the cloud application client; examining the network traffic to identify the cloud application; identifying an application handler in a plurality of application handlers for processing the network traffic involving the cloud application hosted by a particular server computer, each application handler in the plurality of application handlers being configured to process network traffic of a particular cloud application in a plurality of cloud applications to identify and log access to a corresponding cloud application, each of the plurality of cloud applications being hosted by a corresponding particular server computer; forwarding the network traffic to the application handler; and enforcing on the network traffic an application policy in a plurality of application policies; generating a cloud access log that indicates the network traffic; forwarding the cloud access log to a log analysis server over the Internet; and generating a cloud access report based on the cloud access log, (a) wherein a first application policy in the plurality of application policies indicates blocking cloud applications that belong to a category of cloud applications, and wherein enforcing the application policy comprises determining a category of the cloud application and blocking the network traffic in response to determining that the cloud application belongs to the category of cloud applications, (b) wherein a second application policy in the plurality of application policies indicates which user can access which cloud application in the plurality of cloud applications, and wherein enforcing the application policy comprises determining a user of the cloud application client and blocking the network traffic in response to determining that the user is not authorized to access the cloud application, and (c) wherein a server that is hosting the cloud application is in a blacklist, and wherein enforcing the application policy comprises blocking the network traffic in accordance with the blacklist.