The visibility CASBs provide was a game-changer for many enterprise security professionals. They were able to see their unsanctioned software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and the risks associated with them.
A CASB has several capabilities, including device posture scanning, logging, alerting, malware detection, and encryption. It also enforces policy on data-at-rest and monitors and controls data-in-motion across the environment.
Defends Against Threats
What is the purpose of the CASB? The primary pillar of any CASB is security, and it offers advanced features like data loss prevention (DLP), data classification, access control, and encryption. CASBs also offer a powerful visibility capability that tracks content in motion across the cloud and on-premise networks to detect and remediate misconfigurations before they become threats.
When CASBs first emerged, their primary use case was to curb “Shadow IT,” which involves employees using unapproved cloud services. This remains a concern today as enterprises accelerate formal adoption of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications.
However, a more significant threat has evolved with the rise of third-party connected apps. These are often poorly configured or overtly malicious and can significantly impact business operations. CASBs help organizations discover these apps and enable them to disconnect from risky applications.
The ideal CASB architecture operates inline via a forward proxy to intercept requests to cloud services from endpoints. This enables the CASB to enforce security policies on both inbound and outbound traffic. Device attributes and contextual threat intelligence enhance this visibility and enforcement to improve threat detection accuracy. This enables the CASB to block or limit access to sensitive information based on policy and context. It also offers granular, risk-based authentication and logging. CASBs can be delivered as hardware or software, but they’re best provided as a cloud service for greater scalability, lower costs, and easier management.
Monitors & Controls Your Most Sensitive Data Flows
With CASBs in place, organizations can see data flow through cloud applications and services. The solution identifies the data being shared with untrusted systems, such as external partners or cloud-based collaboration tools, and encrypts it to prevent theft. This enables the data to be accessed only by the intended recipients.
Additionally, CASB solutions can identify misconfigurations that could lead to a breach and alert administrators so that the issues can be resolved. This is especially critical for companies that operate in sensitive industries, such as aerospace, defense, and healthcare.
CASB solutions also enable IT to monitor and control unauthorized devices and cloud applications, often called shadow IT.
While a CASB can offer a wide range of security functions, companies must establish the use cases they want to prioritize and evaluate vendors about those use cases. For instance, an organization may prefer a solution that observes modern privacy standards and only inspects company data or integrates with other security services like secure web gateways, application firewalls, and data loss prevention tools to provide a more comprehensive, integrated cybersecurity platform.
Monitors & Controls Third-Party Connected Devices
With the rise of BYOD and unsanctioned cloud usage (shadow IT), CASB solutions can help organizations discover, monitor, and control managed and unmanaged devices. This is vital for ensuring compliance standards, particularly regarding industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, FINRA, and more. With the right CASB solution, you can also optimize a data loss prevention practice by monitoring sensitive files uploaded into unsanctioned repositories.
Unlike traditional point solutions, which only inspect data at rest and offer limited log telemetry capabilities, CASBs provide visibility into third-party connections to the cloud.
They can act as an enforcement agent on the enterprise network and the cloud. This means they can detect and block unauthorized access to SaaS applications, NGFWs, web servers, and other critical assets that malicious actors might compromise.
As an added benefit, CASBs can also work with your IAM tools to ensure access is secure from all angles. This is done by detecting new device profiles on the network, communicating with IAM to verify credentials, and alerting them when a threat is detected.
They can also identify misconfigurations in SaaS services and alert the admin to fix them. In addition, they can control risky file sharing by implementing policies such as data loss prevention (DLP) and role-based access controls.
Monitors & Controls Your Most Sensitive Data Flows
A CASB delivers significant visibility into the movement of data to, from, and within multiple cloud environments, which enables security teams to create granular policies that limit or control access.
This allows IT to monitor and identify unauthorized devices, applications, and users and protect against phishing, ransomware, or malware on any user device or personal app.
For example, employees in hybrid or remote jobs may upload critical files to unsecured cloud collaboration tools or email them to colleagues, potentially leaving the organization vulnerable to losing trade secrets or engineering designs.
A CASB can optimize a data loss prevention practice by monitoring this activity, and if an issue is detected, automatically alert or even stop the activity, preventing unauthorized information leaks.
Finally, a good CASB offers threat protection capabilities that prevent an enterprise from falling prey to the latest cyber attacks targeting the cloud. A CASB solution can help organizations automate threat alerts and responses to achieve agile end-user security by leveraging multi-cloud context, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and machine learning.
Final Words
A CASB can also support the organization in maintaining compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and FINRA. It monitors the movement of sensitive data, identifies risks based on policy violations, and evaluates risks to provide an accurate picture of how the organization complies with regulatory requirements.
