A CASB monitors cloud applications, ensuring system traffic between your organization’s infrastructure and the cloud platform complies with your security policies. It helps to address challenges like unsanctioned cloud usage and securing data from ex-employees using BYOD devices.
Look for a CASB that discovers your sanctioned SaaS apps and detects threats across them without updating configurations manually. A CASB should also support collaboration management.
What is a CASB?
A cloud access security broker ( CASB) applies enterprise security policies to cloud environments outside the traditional network perimeter. They provide visibility into all sanctioned or unsanctioned applications and perform risk assessments to identify and combat threats. Depending on deployment options, they can operate as a forward or reverse proxy deployed out-of-band or inline.
Visibility and Control
Unmanaged devices and shadow IT are driving a need for greater visibility into and control of all cloud services. CASBs discover all cloud applications in use, report on usage trends and spending, and help IT to limit or block access to apps that don’t meet security policies.
They can also detect malware in sanctioned and unsanctioned services, prevent data exfiltration between approved and unmanaged apps, and identify former employees with access to company data. They can integrate with MDM solutions to support centralized device management, arm NGFWs and other security tools with their alerts and data feeds, and use machine learning to identify anomalous user behavior. In addition, CASBs can be deployed on-premises or as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution.
Authentication
CASBs ensure system traffic inside on-premise gadgets and that the cloud supplier adheres to your organization’s security approaches. The device evaluates system activity based on different criteria and distinguishes sanctioned use of cloud applications from unsanctioned ones. It also performs device posture scanning and malware prevention for endpoints connecting to the CASB and offers encryption and tokenization at the data-in-transit stage.
Besides the visibility and control they provide, a CASB helps you discover your organization’s cloud services and catalog them so that you can see which ones are being used. It is crucial when organizations use cloud applications that aren’t sanctioned and could expose the company to risk.
CASBs also help you monitor compliance with GDPR, SOX, and PCI regulations and best practice standards like the cloud security alliance’s best practices. The tool can identify potential violations and take corrective actions automatically or alert you. It can also be configured to automatically enforce organizational data loss prevention policies on shared data items such as files, folders, and databases.
Encryption
As businesses migrate to the cloud, they must address security challenges. CASBs provide visibility and control to monitor the security of cloud applications. They also offer data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to protect sensitive content. They help IT extend its security policies to the cloud and address information overflow from the cloud environment.
CASB solutions can be delivered in the form of on-premise hardware or software. They can be forward proxy-based, reverse proxy-based, or API-based (called multi-mode). They can also include functions such as logging, alerting, malware detection, and encryption.
CASBs are an essential part of any cybersecurity framework. They provide visibility into unsanctioned SaaS usage and allow organizations to take action to prevent data leaks. They also offer out-of-band protection for sensitive data at rest, such as encryption and tokenization. Ensures that only authorized users can access the data and enables them to comply with regulatory requirements such as PCI, HIPAA, and PII. They also help reduce costs preventing data exfiltration from sanctioned to unsanctioned cloud services.
Monitoring
Monitoring and assessing cloud infrastructure security is a complex task for an IT team. A CASB can continuously evaluate the health of your AWS workloads based on best practices set the Centre for Internet Security (CIS).
CASBs can monitor and protect data between in-house IT architectures and cloud vendor environments. They can perform cloud discovery analytics to understand which apps are used, what sort of data is being stored within each app, and how that information is being shared, and they can also detect abnormal behavior that could indicate an attack or data breach.
CASBs can be hosted on-premises or in the cloud and delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or an appliance. Depending on your business requirements and security concerns, they can be installed behind the corporate firewall or at a secure offsite location. They can be deployed with forward or reverse proxy capabilities and are compatible with managed and unmanaged devices. They also support various popular applications, including collaboration tools, social media, and email.
Compliance
A CASB addresses security gaps created the proliferation of cloud applications and the expansion of the enterprise network to include non-managed devices. A CASB solution offers cloud visibility to help organizations identify unmanaged applications that are accessing data and enables more granular policies to be applied to limit these apps’ access to corporate data.
A CASB can also discover sensitive data across cloud applications, helping the organization improve the protection of confidential information. The CASB can then prevent data loss enforcing varying levels of access to data based on user identity, device, or job function.
A good CASB can detect threats, prevent malware and provide advanced threat protection capabilities. When choosing a CASB, consider the breadth of functionality, including whether it can identify and categorize cloud applications, distinguish between managed and unmanaged devices, and support field-level data encryption. You can eliminate point products, reduce IT complexity and inspect traffic in a single pass.
