The right CASB solution protects data in SaaS applications and monitors and controls activity in IaaS environments. This enables businesses to boost productivity while maintaining security and compliance policies.
A CASB can help prevent losses of valuable intellectual property like engineering designs and trade secrets, as well as insider threats such as accidental sharing or malicious attacks. It can also support compliance standards like PII, PCI, HIPAA, and consumer privacy regulations.
Security
A reliable CASB offers advanced data protection with features like data loss prevention (DLP), access control, information rights management, encryption, tokenization, and more. These protect against malware, ransomware, data theft, unauthorized downloads, and employee compliance violations.
As organizations accelerate their formal adoption of cloud resources, CASBs help bridge security gaps created by the erosion of traditional perimeter protection. They also help ensure that security configurations remain aligned with industry standards and benchmarks, including those for HIPAA, HITECH, PCI, or other industry compliance requirements.
A CASB can also help administrators discover shadow IT and reveal hidden cloud expenditure by delivering visibility into the actual use of cloud services across managed and unmanaged devices. This helps support necessary work practices without compromising mission-critical systems while also reducing the cost of unnecessary services. When evaluating CASB solutions, look for multimode capabilities offering forward proxy and API mode functionality to provide the most significant security coverage. In addition, ensure that the CASB integrates with your existing cloud and on-premises tools, such as NGFWs, firewalls, IAM systems, DLP software, and more.
Compliance
When your team uses cloud apps and platforms, CASB helps protect data in case of a breach or loss. It does this by leveraging various capabilities, from logging and reporting to identity management, DLP, application control, and more. These functions are woven into the solution and seamlessly integrated with your core security infrastructure.
This includes your existing systems like your firewall, secure web gateway, and SIEM. A CASB solution can monitor and collect logs from these systems, allowing it to detect abnormal access to sanctioned applications such as file-sharing services or unauthorized use of accounts.
A CASB system also prevents the loss of intellectual property, including trade secrets and engineering designs, when employees share files through cloud collaboration or messaging tools. The solution can limit who can access and view these files and restrict if they’re saved to public links, helping ensure compliance with corporate policies. In addition, a robust CASB solution will include a module that works to prevent data leakage or theft by blocking unauthorized data transfers and alerting administrators to suspicious activity.
Visibility
Visibility is an important measurement that allows you to see the range of possible outcomes. It’s critical for various purposes, including aviation safety and weather reports. Visibility is the distance range at which objects can be discerned based on light transmission and reflection characteristics.
A CASB solution gives visibility into the activities of your cloud environment and helps you identify unsanctioned applications. This reduces Shadow IT risks and the likelihood that sensitive data is being used unauthorizedly.
The CASB can also help prevent data leaks by monitoring and auditing data movement to, from, and between cloud services. It can also integrate with your existing security infrastructure to protect data against known and unknown threats, such as malware and ransomware.
A CASB can be deployed in three ways: on-premises, reverse proxy, or SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS models are increasingly popular because they provide quicker deployment and more comprehensive coverage. You can also use a hybrid model that combines on-premises and SaaS deployments for flexibility and improved protection.
Control
With CASBs, businesses can monitor and control the security of their data from threats that might arise outside of their firewall. This is because a CASB has capabilities such as threat detection, prioritization, and machine learning to spot anomalous user behavior patterns. This information can then be acted on to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.
CASBs also help businesses comply with data regulations. This is because they are cross-platform and can manage data across all business platforms, ensuring the correct standards are met. They can also detect compliance gaps before they become costly breaches.
Moreover, a CASB can be used to monitor employee activity and identify any suspicious behavior. This is because the solution typically comes with a module that works to prevent data leaks, commonly called data loss prevention (DLP). The function checks for any unauthorized activity by users and then flags it to administrators. It can then take action to protect the data, such as putting it on lockdown or sending an alert. This enables the organization to keep its data secure without hindering productivity.
Efficiency
CASBs allow organizations to safely enable sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services by applying policies to control the activities in those systems. IT teams don’t want to take a sledgehammer and block all cloud applications; instead, they need granular security controls for activities like sharing or downloading files. CASBs provide:
- That granularity and support shadow IT control.
- SaaS security posture management.
- Advanced threat protection.
- Data security inspection.
CASBs can also be used to protect data in motion by using functions like malware prevention, encryption, and tokenization. Encryption shields information from interception during transmission, while tokenization converts sensitive data into symbols (like numbers or letters) that can be viewed but cannot be decoded. This approach can also protect data at rest by ensuring the right people access it. This is crucial when it comes to upholding compliance standards. This can be achieved by monitoring who is accessing the data and by which means they are doing so. Combined with an on-premises DLP solution, this can ensure that the most critical data is protected even when shared between cloud solutions.
