Organizations are quickly transitioning to cloud-based software and infrastructure, and CASB solutions can provide valuable assistance. The purpose of these tools is to identify and eliminate potential risks by identifying shadow IT, denying access to unauthorized services and safeguarding data.
The best CASB solutions offer four key feature sets: Visibility, Compliance, Security and Threat Protection. Learn how to evaluate these features and decide which CASB solution is right for your organization.
Security
Organizations must be able to protect sensitive information from internal and external threats, including data leakage. CASB applications provide a way to monitor the movement of confidential information. They can offer security features like access control, collaboration control, DLP, encryption, tokenization, and information rights management (IRM) that help organizations reduce the risk of exposing sensitive corporate information.
A CASB sits on the edge of the corporate network, inspecting all traffic entering and leaving the cloud infrastructure, and can block or report on activity that violates an enterprise’s security policies. It can also distinguish between managed and unmanaged devices and enforce different approaches. CASBs can offer access control, visibility, threat prevention, and data protection for all the SaaS apps an organization uses.
The rise of Shadow IT and the proliferation of cloud-based applications has made it increasingly easier for enterprises to monitor where data is used in multiple environments and cloud apps. This is why the visibility that a CASB provides is a key benefit.
A CASB solution monitors data movement from the cloud to other locations, such as file-sharing sites. They can detect sensitive files uploaded to third-party places and alert administrators, who can take corrective action, such as revocation of access privileges or blocking the user’s device or account. A CASB can also secure data in the cloud, scrambling it so that even if the data is accessed and downloaded by an attacker, it cannot be read.
Compliance
A CASB solution is now a critical component of an organization’s cybersecurity framework, providing unequaled security, visibility, and command over access to cloud applications. Moreover, the solution helps resolve enterprises’ significant challenges while storing their data on cloud applications.
Visibility: The primary requirement for a CASB is to provide significant visibility into users and their SaaS apps. This enables organizations to identify and disconnect from risky or inappropriate applications. Moreover, the solution should give discovery for both sanctioned and unsanctioned apps. It should also support multiple deployment models (API, inline proxy, or out-of-band) and offer native advanced security functions, such as activity monitoring, DLP, logging, and malware detection.
Compliance: Besides providing visibility, a CASB solution should help ensure that all data moves between on-premises and the cloud comply with the organization’s security policies. This is accomplished through features and technologies like access control, collaboration control, DLP, and encryption.
As the business grows and expands, the CASB should be able to scale up and down to meet the organization’s requirements. Moreover, it should offer integration with other security solutions and the ability to monitor data in real-time. It should also be able to detect malicious behaviors in the application and infrastructure and block them from accessing the network.
Visibility
With the proliferation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and bring-your-own-device policies, IT organizations face a challenge in safeguarding corporate data. The CASB solution monitors and enforces security policies on cloud applications, users, and files. A CASB can detect data leaks, compliance breaches, and other threats by analyzing user attributes such as device type, location, OS, and cloud app usage.
CASBs can also discover unsanctioned applications, such as shadow IT, and assess their risk to determine whether they should be blocked. This can be particularly important for enterprises possessing large volumes of sensitive information, such as financial data, proprietary information, health records, and credit card numbers. The CASB can prevent these applications from accessing sensitive information by performing encryption and tokenization and enforcing security policies that prevent unauthorized uploads to third-party locations.
When evaluating CASB vendors, organizations should consider whether they can offer visibility into the entire network, including SaaS, IaaS, and personal devices. They should also look for a CASB to protect from advanced threats like malware and ransomware. This requires a multilayered approach that includes CASBs, next-generation secure web gateways, and data loss prevention (DLP) tools.
Flexibility
CASB solutions provide visibility into the data and activities of cloud applications, users and devices. They also protect against threats and enable organizations to comply with security and privacy policies. CASBs protect data in motion and at rest using encryption, logging, and device and user posture profiling.
When CASBs first emerged, the key use case was stemming threats from Shadow IT. Since then, however, the threat landscape has evolved and diversified. Malware is more pervasive and sophisticated, phishing attacks are increasingly targeted, and even small mistakes like misconfigured SaaS services can expose sensitive information to hackers.
The result is that a comprehensive CASB solution is now more necessary than ever. Today’s CASBs are quicker to deploy and easier to manage, with intuitive dashboards that make it easy to identify risks and take action. They’re also more inclusive in terms of apps supported, with some vendors able to spin up support for any custom app within days and others providing features like dynamic application identification that can detect changes in underlying apps that might elude traditional reverse proxies.
When selecting a CASB solution, look for one that integrates with email providers to detect and prevent data leaks, secure web gateways, identity management systems, DLP tools and single sign-on capabilities. You’ll also want to ensure it offers significant threat protection through deep visibility, analytics, and automated response capabilities.