With the rise of remote and mobile work, employees often use productivity-enhancing but unsanctioned cloud apps. A CASB allows you to monitor and govern these apps without impacting productivity.
CASBs deliver security management, including features such as visibility, data loss prevention (DLP), device posture profiling, logging and alerting. They can be deployed inline as proxies or via API integrations.
Security
With the increased use of cloud-based applications, organizations must take steps to protect data from security threats. CASBs help with this by detecting and preventing threats. They also provide visibility into sensitive content within or between the cloud. They do this through document fingerprinting, threat intelligence and other detection mechanisms. They can also protect against data leaks through tokenization and encryption. They can even prevent unauthorized data movement from a company to a competitor or customer.
CASBs can discover all the cloud-based applications employees use, including those with SSL-encrypted connections. They can then classify these applications based on their security risks. This information can then be used to apply appropriate policies. For example, a company can block access to an app if it is known to be vulnerable to attacks or contains confidential information.
Knowing what is a CASB is important for your business since it has the vital attribute of identifying dangers. They can monitor and protect data that moves across the internet, allowing them to protect against attacks like DDoS or ransomware. They can also prevent data breaches by detecting anomalies in user behavior. They can identify suspicious activity and determine which users leak credentials through unsecured cloud services. They can also help organizations comply with industry regulations such as HIPAA and ISO. They can also protect against cloud malware and detect unauthorized cloud storage.
Compliance
While the move to cloud-based applications has enabled employees to collaborate more efficiently, it also presents challenges for organizations concerned with data security. A CASB provides visibility into how cloud apps are used and enforces policies to protect sensitive information. It can detect inappropriate data sharing and alert administrators to potential threats. CASB solutions can be deployed on-premises or as SaaS. Regardless of the deployment model, they should provide comprehensive cloud protection, including visibility into SSL-encrypted traffic and dynamic and static malware analysis.
CASBs can help organizations comply with security and privacy regulations, such as HIPAA and ISO 27001, even when the applications are outside the corporate network. They can also perform audits to identify potential gaps and recommend remediation options. Additionally, CASBs can detect unsanctioned software-as-a-service usage and Shadow IT. This helps reduce the risk of unauthorized use of cloud services and allows enterprises to manage data access better.
In addition to visibility into cloud app usage, CASBs offer a range of compliance measures, such as policy enforcement and monitoring, identity and access management, threat detection, and forensic analysis. They can also be integrated with NGFWs to provide additional security layers, such as advanced threat protection. CASBs also support data loss prevention (DLP) technologies, such as encryption and tokenization, to prevent the unintended movement of sensitive data across the cloud.
Visibility
When evaluating CASB vendors, consider how they perform each of the four pillars of cloud security: visibility, compliance, protection and discovery. This helps ensure that a business’s data is protected by its data policies. It also prevents confidential information from leaving the organization, and it can detect data breaches and help meet regulatory compliance standards. A CASB can also perform an inline and out-of-band inspection to prevent sensitive data from being publicly exposed or shared with external audiences.
Visibility measures taken by CASBs include automatic discovery, device profiling and reporting, inline control and threat analysis. This helps IT teams identify unsanctioned cloud apps and devices, including unmanaged devices such as USB drives and personal email accounts. In addition, CASBs can track data movement and detect suspicious activity, such as file deletion and uploads.
CASBs can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud. They’re mostly deployed as a service (SaaS) to simplify deployment and speed up time to value. This approach allows businesses to get up and running faster with a complete suite of capabilities. Other deployment models include API control, reverse proxy and forward proxy. All of these approaches provide varying degrees of visibility. The key is to determine which one best meets your organization’s needs. For example, if your company’s priority is to protect confidential data from leaks, look for a CASB that performs inline and out-of-band inspection of outbound web traffic.
Cost
While CASBs are a valuable asset for enterprises, they come at a cost. However, several measures can be taken to limit this cost. The first step is determining which use cases are most important for your business. Once this has been done, you can evaluate vendors about those specific goals and needs. This can be accomplished by performing detailed POCs, collecting research from cybersecurity analysts, or conducting in-depth reference calls with similar organizations.
Then, you can look for a vendor that offers various services to reduce the overall cost of deployment and management. This can include multiple security access control features such as single sign-on, authentication, device profiling, encryption alerting, and malware detection. In addition, a CASB deployed as a multimode solution provides greater flexibility regarding the types of policies that can be enforced.
CASBs also provide visibility into cloud usage within an enterprise. This helps discover “shadow IT” systems that introduce undocumented risks to the organization. In addition, CASBs can help prevent data from leaving company-controlled systems by monitoring activity on cloud storage, such as when sensitive documents are downloaded to personal devices. This feature is particularly useful for enterprises with a BYOD policy, as it can prevent confidential data from being downloaded to unmanaged smartphones, USB drives, and personal email accounts.