CASBs deliver visibility into cloud environments, security policy enforcement, threat detection, and data protection. Depending on your business requirements, consider a multimode solution that can run on the data center, in the cloud, or on endpoints.
CASBs also help secure sensitive information from being leaked by employees or third parties with stolen credentials. Combined with effective data loss prevention (DLP), this is a crucial use case for CASB.
Authentication
CASB security definition empowers you to set granular access controls based on user roles, location, and device type. It’s like a customizable ID scanner, ensuring only employees with the right clearance can access sensitive data while everyone else sees a “no entry” sign. CASBs enable organizations to gain visibility into cloud application usage. This is important because moving to the cloud means data is being used in applications outside of IT’s view, often on unmanaged devices. This leaves organizations vulnerable to cyberattacks. CASB solutions can help protect users, critical business data, and infrastructure by scanning for malware and threats in cloud applications.
To detect threats, CASBs have several mechanisms, including APIs, gateways, and log data. Gateways monitor activity, while APIs enable CASB solutions to integrate with other security tools. Log data can be imported from firewalls and secure web gateways to provide real-time insights into resource use, security controls, and device uptime.
CASBs also offer many types of protection, such as malware prevention and encryption. Malware prevention can identify phishing attacks and other malware before they can interrupt productivity or steal data. At the same time, encryption ensures that data that crosses the wire is unreadable to attackers. Additionally, CASBs can help identify and remediate ransomware based on threat intelligence and other sources of information.
Encryption
With CASBs, organizations can enforce granular access policies across managed and unmanaged devices. They can also encrypt data at rest and in transit to prevent malicious users from accessing and exploiting sensitive information. This helps businesses meet regional regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR.
CASBs use machine learning-based user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to compile a baseline view of average usage patterns for each cloud service, application, and device. This enables them to detect anomalous activities such as malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks, and they can block them with adaptive access control, encryption, and tokenization.
Many enterprises risk losing intellectual property, engineering designs, and other corporate data due to employee negligence or malice when sharing files with external parties via cloud-based collaboration tools. CASBs can help reduce this risk by automatically scanning for and identifying files that contain sensitive information, checking with whom the file is being shared, and delivering real-time remediation.
Access Control
CASBs protect data in and around the cloud by monitoring, policy enforcement, and threat detection. This helps organizations safely enable productivity-enhancing apps without impacting security and compliance. To do this, CASBs use discovery and auto-classification to find SaaS applications and the information they access in and out of the organization. Then, they analyze the risk based on community trust ratings and other metrics.
This allows CASBs to connect and disconnect users from unsanctioned apps while enabling security policies to block suspicious activity or limit data loss. The CASB can also leverage encryption to protect data at rest and in transit.
Lastly, some CASBs are deployed as proxies, while others are delivered via APIs for deployment flexibility. Those that support both models are known as multimode CASBs. These are especially helpful for businesses with a hybrid IT environment that must manage managed and unmanaged devices.
Monitoring
As organizations accelerate the formal adoption of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and FaaS resources, they must balance enabling employees to work efficiently by providing them with access to business applications while maintaining the security integrity of corporate data. CASBs bridge the gap by enforcing granular access policies across all cloud apps, whether deployed inline as proxies (with API integration), behind the firewall as gateways, or on endpoint devices using agents.
CASBs also deliver prevention capabilities to defend against attacks that target sensitive data in the cloud. This includes malware prevention to block ransomware from infecting employee devices, preventing unauthorized data sharing within or between cloud services, and identifying compromised accounts.
In addition, CASBs can be configured to identify and monitor compliance with regulatory requirements such as SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. This is critical for minimizing fines and penalties and avoiding costly security breaches. Inspect how a CASB delivers this capability to ensure it meets your organizational needs. Identify if the product integrates with your existing identity-as-a-service and single sign-on solutions, secure web gateways, application firewalls, and data loss prevention tools.
Reporting
As companies accelerate the formal adoption of cloud infrastructure and more employees utilize time-saving, productivity-enhancing cloud applications, they must bridge the gap between centralized IT control and user freedom. CASB solutions allow organizations to achieve granular visibility into cloud access and usage, detect anomalous activity, prevent data breaches, and alert administrators to unauthorized users or devices.
CASBs can help organizations maintain compliance with industry and regulatory requirements like SOC 2, HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR. These solutions can ingest logs, discover and catalog cloud apps used in the workplace or by remote employees, and compare application security configurations against standards for compliance. CASBs can also help organizations identify former employees who may still have access to company data and address other compliance risks.
CASBs can also prevent the loss of intellectual property and other business-critical data from insider threats. Examples of such threats include employees sharing engineering designs, customer sales records, and other sensitive data on unsecured platforms or via public links. By detecting these activities and enabling granular access controls based on location, job function, and device type, a CASB can stop such threats before they occur.
