A CASB solution monitors, logs, and enforces security policies for cloud applications. It identifies shadow IT and stops data breaches by detecting unauthorized devices and applications. It also provides security functions like encrypting data-at-rest and in transit, UEBA technology, and blocking malware.
Access Control
The initial use case for CASBs was stemming threats that arose from shadow IT, but protecting both the movement of data and the content of data in cloud environments is a crucial pillar today. A CASB solution helps to protect against malware and phishing, ensures the security of SaaS apps, and protects users and their devices by monitoring activity on the network.
Visibility is critical, and a good CASB solution should provide significant visibility into multi-cloud activity. It can identify unauthorized connected devices, discover unknown applications with access to organizational data, and alert administrators of risky actions like uploading sensitive files to third-party locations. It can also help to find and disconnect from unsecured or unwanted applications.
Finally, a CASB should support a unified policy for uniform security controls and threat detection across all these control points. A CASB can deliver these functions through proxying, APIs, or both in a multimode solution, and it can be deployed on-premises or as a cloud service. In addition to the basic functions mentioned above, a CASB should be able to detect and classify data. This is a crucial step in helping to secure sensitive data, and it can be accomplished by analyzing the contents of files and comparing them with known threats.
Visibility
As users move to work remotely and on multiple devices, organizations need help to see what data is being used by what applications. CASB solutions give businesses visibility into the cloud and help safeguard user and business information.
Visibility is particularly important because it helps address the risks of Shadow IT, where employees use unmanaged tools to conduct workflows beyond what the organization’s approved tech stack provides. These unmanaged tools could contain sensitive information or be vulnerable to hackers seeking to steal credentials and access corporate systems. A CASB solution can monitor activities within managed and unsanctioned applications to detect suspicious behavior, helping organizations mitigate these risks.
CASBs can also assess the risk of cloud services using discovery analysis and provide insights through risk assessment to help professionals decide whether to allow certain applications to connect to the enterprise network. This helps minimize the number of applications that can access the organization’s data, protecting against the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data and helping reduce the cost of storing and managing unstructured data in the cloud.
While a CASB solution can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, most are SaaS-based. This deployment option allows for quicker deployment and more comprehensive coverage of the cloud environment.
Threat Detection
A CASB is critical in protecting sensitive information as it moves between the company’s cloud environments and on-premises systems. It can detect unauthorized access and prevent data leaks by analyzing files, scanning applications, and identifying devices for uploading or downloading data. It also prevents malicious threats from entering the company system with tools like sandboxing, URL filtering, and anti-malware analysis.
The need for a CASB is growing as more business processes move to the cloud. As a result, traditional network security tools are no longer effective and must be replaced with a more complete tool set. The four key functions of a CASB include Visibility, Threat Protection, Compliance, and Data Protection.
Visibility is seeing what’s being used in a company’s cloud environment. These are technology solutions and services used by employees that IT hasn’t approved. They may offer convenience or efficiency benefits but can also introduce significant risk. A CASB solution provides visibility by analyzing all of the cloud platforms and apps in use within an organization comparing them against a list of policies. It can then alert security teams if it spots any suspicious activity so they can take corrective action before damage is done. It also protects data in transit with encryption or tokenization that shields information from view if someone intercepts it.
Data Protection
Data Protection aims to prevent threats from impacting the organization’s critical assets. It leverages CASB’s deep visibility to identify the threat landscape and ensure access control is secure from all angles, including insider and external threats. To do this, a CASB solution analyzes and classifies resources provisioned on the cloud infrastructure using discovery and classification capabilities. Then, it uses the granular information it collects to establish a baseline and detect abnormal behaviors. For example, if an employee downloads sensitive data from a SaaS application and tries to transfer it to their device, the CASB would intercept and block the download. It also sends an alert to the security team. Besides detecting unusual behavior, the CASB solution should encrypt the data movement from and to the cloud. This way, only authorized personnel can view the data. It should also protect data stored on devices by tokenizing it, so if the device is lost or stolen, only non-sensitive information will be accessible to hackers.
