CASBs provide visibility into cloud apps and help to control data threats such as malware, ransomware and other cyber attacks. They also offer unified threat detection and protection to close gaps between enterprise security infrastructure and cloud app controls.
CASBs reduce the risk of Shadow IT – applications and infrastructure that are managed and used without the knowledge of the enterprise’s IT team. They also encrypt data-in-rest and data-in-transit to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access.
Security Measures
Security systems aim to protect data, applications and devices against malware and other threats. Whether it’s a traditional firewall, antivirus software or data loss prevention solution, these tools protect your network and devices. They can block malicious traffic, detect malware and identify threats, and help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.
However, the threat landscape is constantly evolving. Today, threats are much more sophisticated, using multiple exploits and obfuscation technologies to hide their presence. Many traditional security solutions aren’t built to keep up with these new threats, so they struggle to stop them.
This is where CASB comes in. A CASB is a cloud security platform that helps close the gap between your existing security infrastructure and the new tools you use to manage your data in the cloud. Cloud Access Security Brokers CASB can scan for threats in your cloud storage and application environments and prevent data breaches by enforcing security policies. It also stops the lateral movement of sensitive data from the cloud to other untrusted locations on the network and prevents unsanctioned data from entering your environment.
A CASB also integrates with other security infrastructure to prevent malware from entering your network through cloud services, enabling you to stop attacks before they begin. It can use a combination of threat detection, anomaly detection, obfuscation analysis, and machine learning to scan and analyze cloud applications for suspicious content. CASBs also help you meet regulatory requirements by providing visibility into your cloud data, and they can automatically enforce policy compliance on both internal and external networks.
As your organization adopts more and more cloud-based applications, ensuring you completely understand where all your data is stored and how it’s being used becomes increasingly important. CASBs enable you to gain this visibility and can be configured to monitor all your cloud-based apps in real time. This way, you can ensure that your cloud apps are secure and compliant with GDPR or HIPAA regulations.
CASBs can protect your data from threats like cloud malware and ransomware. With full visibility into all of your cloud apps, a CASB can monitor and filter out malicious traffic, detect suspicious activities and help you stop data leaks by encrypting data in transit and preventing unauthorized uploads. Additionally, a CASB can prevent malware from spreading across your network by blocking connections to known bad URLs and using static and dynamic anti-malware and obfuscation techniques to scan and detect malicious code.
It’s critical to balance safety with employee productivity, and a good CASB will allow you to adjust permissions at a fine-grained level. You can restrict the types of files you want to be monitored, for example, and limit access to personal Dropbox accounts within the office.
CASB
The growing use of cloud apps, the proliferation of remote and mobile workers, and the sophistication of hackers and digital adversaries have made safeguarding sensitive information a critical challenge for organizations. As CASB technology has evolved, it has become a key element of the security infrastructure for organizations that use or plan to use the cloud. A CASB solution is designed to protect data in use, in motion and at rest, extending an organization’s existing protection capabilities into the cloud environment.
The cloud’s shared responsibility model makes it challenging for businesses to achieve visibility and control over their IT environments. IT teams cannot manually manage granular user access controls for thousands of cloud applications and services or apply the same security policies they use on-prem. This is why CASBs were originally developed: to fill in the gaps and augment the security tools that IT uses today.
With CASBs, IT can fully see all cloud activity and ensure only authorized users use sanctioned apps and services. CASBs can also help IT maintain compliance with various regulations that govern the privacy and security of enterprise data, such as HIPAA and PCI DSS. CASBs can automatically report and detect potential violations and offer guidance to resolve them.
A CASB can integrate with identity-as-a-service (IDaaS)/single sign-on (SSO) tools to ensure all employees are vetted during the login process. Many CASB solutions also support a higher risk-based or adaptive authentication level, which can address challenges for the most sensitive content. This reduces the likelihood that this sensitive data will end up in criminal hands. CASBs can also encrypt fingerprint files moving onto and off of the cloud, further protecting them from being stolen or corrupted.
Besides monitoring for unauthorized use of sanctioned apps, a good CASB can also alert IT to abnormal behavior on unsanctioned applications within the organization. For example, if a sales executive downloads customer data from Salesforce to his personal Google Drive, the CASB can notify IT and alert the employee to stop this activity.
When evaluating a CASB, consider the core use cases you want to prioritize and select a solution that can address those use cases. For example, a CASB should be able to track and identify unauthorized use of cloud applications, alert IT and override or adjust permissions at a detailed level. This will balance safety with collaboration and enable employees to do their jobs while keeping the company secure. It should also detect and prevent insider threats by identifying abnormal patterns of activity that might indicate malicious intent.