CASBs sit between cloud network users and applications to monitor and enforce security policies. Look for a multimode CASB to take advantage of all its features.
CASBs help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements like HIPAA, PCI, and more. They also safeguard data against cyberattacks through malware prevention and protect sensitive data at rest and in transit via encryption.
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Auto-Discovery
CASBs allow administrators to monitor activity and security threats in managed and unmanaged cloud applications. Using auto-discovery, they display all the cloud services and identify high-risk apps, users, or other key risk factors. They then protect the organization’s data by applying various security access controls such as device profiling and encryption. They can also provide additional services, such as credential mapping when single sign-on is unavailable.
Detecting suspicious authentication attempts, detecting malware or ransomware, and alerting administrators of potential threats are other functions that a cloud access security broker performs. This is especially useful for businesses that must maintain compliance with specific regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH for healthcare, PCI for retail, or FFIEC and FINRA for financial services.
Once the full scope of a company’s cloud applications is revealed, a CASB can assess the relative risk of each application by determining what it is, what type of data is stored in it, and how it is shared. They can then use this information to set access policies that comply with the organization’s data and security needs while automatically taking action when a breach occurs.
Threat Intelligence
With the explosion of cloud services and bring-your-own-device policies, it’s becoming harder for IT organizations to control and secure data environments. CASB solutions bridge this gap by identifying and protecting enterprise data in cloud applications. They also serve as security policy enforcement points that combine and interject enterprise security policies when users access cloud service providers.
Shadow IT is a real and growing threat to enterprises. These unsanctioned apps may be used to work around perceived or actual deficiencies in official IT stacks, but they can also introduce additional security risks, such as malware and ransomware.
The best CASBs offer comprehensive visibility into cloud environments and provide granular controls to protect data in motion across the public internet, corporate networks, and multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. They use autodiscovery to identify sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud applications, identify high-risk users, and analyze key risk factors. They also protect enterprise systems from cyberattacks through malware prevention and make data streams unreadable by external entities through encryption. Lastly, they help maintain compliance with regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS.
User Authentication
A CASB is an on-premise or cloud security solution between enterprise users and cloud service providers to combine and interject corporate security policies as they access cloud applications. They are increasingly popular with enterprises for addressing cloud app risks, enforcing security policies and maintaining regulatory compliance, even when applications are beyond the corporate firewall and out of their control.
In addition to offering granular visibility and control of cloud application usage, a CASB can mitigate threat levels through malware prevention and data encryption capabilities. These technologies are critical to protecting proprietary data stored in external, third-party media and helping organizations safeguard their IT architectures, data and users.
In a world of unsanctioned cloud apps (aka shadow IT), the ability to detect when and how corporate files are shared from unsanctioned applications has become a critical component of any cloud security strategy. Automated, easily configurable policies can respond by allowing or blocking specific actions on an individual app or by app category.
Data Loss Prevention
An effective CASB must be capable of stopping data leakage in its tracks before it leaves the organization. This is important because, with the erosion of centralized control, organizations must be able to keep security policies enforced regardless of where their data resides in the cloud.
A CASB’s data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities can identify sensitive data in motion across multiple software-as-a-service applications and on-premise systems and prevent it from being shared with unauthorized users. This functionality is critical because it helps ensure your enterprise data is safe and secure while keeping employees productive.
DLP is also crucial in identifying high-risk behaviors that IT may need to be aware of, especially regarding unsanctioned services, such as file-sharing sites and desktop sync clients. Unlike traditional security controls, CASBs can assess risk at a granular level rather than using a sledgehammer approach to block services. This provides a more flexible and scalable way to safely enable productivity-enhancing cloud services without exposing sensitive information. This is especially important because many unsanctioned applications can expose a company’s sensitive information to attackers.
Compliance
With the proliferation of remote work and bring-your-own-device policies, organizations need visibility into the cloud services and devices used within their networks. CASBs are ideal for this purpose, helping IT discover and report on cloud usage, find system redundancies, and assess risk to establish effective access policies.
A CASB can also safely enable sanctioned and unsanctioned services by applying an appropriate level of control based on the threat landscape and business requirements. For example, it might allow for sharing across a sanctioned cloud file storage service but not across all or enforce a “no sharing outside of the company” policy for a category of unsanctioned cloud collaboration apps.
Compliance is especially important in regulated industries with strict data regulations. A CASB can ensure compliance by monitoring for violations in or en route to the cloud and shuttling suspicious content efficiently back to on-premises systems for further investigation. This is accomplished through advanced detection mechanisms like document fingerprinting and contextualization. It also requires an ability to analyze and compare data flows in the cloud to on-premises security policies for accuracy.
