With the rise of workforce mobility, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and unsanctioned employee cloud application usage (Shadow IT), CASBs are essential tools for protecting data in the cloud. They consolidate multiple types of policy enforcement, such as authentication, device profiling, encryption, and malware detection/prevention. Without visibility and control, organizations risk data loss and a lack of compliance with industry standards. Read on to learn more about the importance of CASBs.
Compliance
CASBs enable compliance services to help maintain protocols and standards when leveraging cloud-based applications. These services can include data loss prevention, application visibility and control, and cloud malware detection. These capabilities ensure that cloud-based applications meet compliance standards and remain secure for users and organizations.
Identify Shadow IT applications: CASBs can scan an organization’s cloud ecosystem to identify all cloud-based applications, analyze the risk of those applications, and offer granular controls that ensure enterprise policies are enforced even when employees use sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services from their devices such as unmanaged smartphones or personal laptops. Safeguard data in the cloud: A cloud access security broker can protect your sensitive information when stored in the cloud by tokenizing and encrypting it, enabling you to securely share it with partners or other business units without losing security control. Additionally, CASBs can remediate SaaS misconfigurations to prevent your data from being exposed by unauthorized personnel or attackers.
Streamline the IT workload: CASBs can reduce your IT’s time spent on cloud-related tasks by automating routine monitoring and enforcement of critical security policies across all platforms, whether managed or unmanaged, authorized or unauthorized. This can save your IT team time and resources so they can focus on more critical projects like implementing new applications or addressing security threats.
Visibility
With the massive migration of services to the cloud and increased business dependency on cloud applications, enterprises need to know how these apps are used. Without visibility, it’s impossible to implement granular security policies that ensure sensitive information doesn’t leave the corporate network. That’s why CASBs are so important.
Positioned between users and cloud service providers, CASBs enable organizations to enforce security policy enforcement on a wide range of applications and data residing in the cloud. This includes both software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
Visibility services provided by CASBs include autodiscovery, which displays all cloud applications utilized within the organization and identifies high-risk applications, users and other key risk factors. This enables the CASB to secure applications by applying various security access controls, including device profiling and encryption. CASBs can also provide additional services, such as credential mapping when single sign-on isn’t available.
In addition, CASBs provide visibility into what’s being uploaded to the cloud, allowing IT to review and approve all data transfers. This helps prevent engineers working on laptops and other devices from sending valuable information to the wrong places, protecting the organization from security breaches, regulatory fines, and lost revenue. As a result, visibility is one of the most important features to look for in a CASB.
Encryption
CASBs provide encryption services for data moving in and out of cloud applications, ensuring sensitive information is only accessible by authorized users. This helps protect against attacks that leverage unsanctioned cloud applications to steal data or credentials that can be used for targeted cyberattacks like phishing, ransomware and malware distribution.
CASB solutions offer security teams visibility into all cloud apps, sanctioned or unsanctioned, to determine their level of risk. This enables them to enact policies that limit or prohibit access and set up strong controls to prevent the unauthorized sharing of confidential information with external parties. CASB DLP capabilities are critical to the overall security of any business that uses cloud-based software or services.
Unsanctioned employee use of cloud apps, known as shadow IT, is a major security threat. These applications often don’t communicate with the enterprise network, making it difficult for IT to monitor them. CASBs can detect and alert when an employee is utilizing an unauthorized application. They can also block unauthorized attempts to install new cloud apps.
CASBs enable businesses to maintain compliance with regulations that apply to the cloud, such as PCI DSS, GDPR and HIPAA. They can also detect and prevent threats by monitoring suspicious or excessive logins, using sandboxing tools to analyze and identify cloud-based malware. CASBs can also be integrated with SIEM systems to enhance protection by combining advanced detection with automated remediation.
Access Control
As businesses have shifted to the cloud, it’s become apparent that they must take a more granular approach to data security and policy enforcement. This is where CASBs have excelled, giving organizations the tools to safely utilize time-saving and productivity-enhancing services without compromising business operations or risking sensitive information.
The first key benefit of a CASB is visibility into cloud usage, including unsanctioned software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage, also known as Shadow IT. Many enterprises are surprised that their IT teams have been using various cloud services without authorization, creating a significant cybersecurity risk.
Top CASB solutions provide comprehensive reporting that includes a detailed analysis of user behavior, a security baseline, and identification of anomalous user activity. Using this information, administrators can deploy policies that prevent the loss of sensitive information to the cloud, block unauthorized file sharing, and remediate SaaS misconfigurations that could open up an organization to attack.
Unlike firewalls, which can be difficult to use due to their complex architectures, a CASB is easy for IT personnel to manage. This enables administrators to say “yes” to useful services while governing access to managed and unmanaged devices. These capabilities make CASBs an essential part of any cloud security strategy.