If a company relies on third-party cloud storage or internet access to keep its data safe, it can become vulnerable to cyber threats. For example, a power outage at a data center can compromise your organization’s access to stored data. CASBs provide visibility into cloud usage and help administrators identify security risks. They also work with IAM tools to prevent unauthorized access and manage user accounts.
Detection
The Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) sits at the edge of an organization’s cloud infrastructure and inspects all traffic from the company’s sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services. What is CASB solution is that it discovers and protects sensitive data moving in and out of the cloud by enforcing DLP policies across all cloud apps deemed risky or inappropriate for the enterprise. The CASB also detects suspicious activity that may indicate an attack by scanning for known malware and analyzing user behavior patterns. Once the full scope of all applications and data in the cloud is understood, a CASB can then classify the level of risk by determining what the application is, what sort of data it accesses, and how it is shared. Sometimes, a CASB can even leverage community trust ratings to determine the relative risk of different applications and help organizations choose which ones to allow. A CASB solution can also provide visibility into shadow IT, including rogue or unapproved cloud services employees use. It can also monitor for internal threats like phishing, ransomware, and loss of intellectual property, such as engineering designs or trade secrets from employee negligence or theft. It can alert administrators to these risks and enable them to use CASB features such as malware prevention, encryption, tokenization, and upload prevention to safeguard sensitive data.
Prevention
As organizations move more business resources to the cloud, they must protect them. Using the same protections they use to protect data on-premises, CASBs enable businesses to prevent cyber threats from disrupting productivity, stealing, or leaking sensitive information. To do this, a CASB needs visibility into how its users access the cloud infrastructure. This enables them to detect unsanctioned software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage, also known as Shadow IT. A CASB can identify and alert administrators of potential breaches with this insight. The following prevention layer is malware detection, which can prevent ransomware from gaining entry into the organization’s systems and data. A CASB uses benchmarks and continual traffic data to monitor for abnormal behavior that could indicate an attack. It can then take action, such as blocking, deleting, or placing in legal hold suspicious files that pose a risk to the business. Finally, a CASB will help to ensure compliance with various regulations. These can include regional mandates or industry regulations. With visibility, automated remediation, policy creation enforcement, and monitoring capabilities, a CASB can help ensure that security protocols are in place for the most sensitive data in the cloud. This can prevent unauthorized access and data breaches from malicious third parties, employees, or hackers.
Encryption
While preventing data leakage from Shadow IT was the primary use case for early CASB adoption, these solutions now protect against other cyber threats affecting all cloud users. This includes insider attacks from authorized users, whether by accident or on purpose. For example, employees sharing files using collaboration tools without proper permission can expose corporate information to unauthorized people. This could include trade secrets, engineering designs, and other intellectual property. Through encryption, CASBs can prevent such a breach, which renders files unreadable to anyone who intercepts them on the network. This is a critical security layer because hackers increasingly use malware, phishing, and other techniques to access data in the cloud. CASBs can also help organizations prevent breaches by detecting suspicious activity, including data uploading from outside the organization and unsecured file sharing. A CASB solution can discover the resources provisioned on an organization’s cloud infrastructure and then classify them by risk level to make it easier for administrators to see what they need to manage. A CASB can also validate authenticated users and stop malicious file transfer through technologies like adaptive access control, dynamic and static malware analysis, and more. It can also monitor and control data-at-rest in the cloud and data-in-motion by encrypting files before they are sent over the internet.
Access Control
When a significant user base relies on cloud applications, IT can need to help manage granular controls across multiple environments and applications. CASBs help monitor suspicious activity and alert administrators to anomalies or policy violations. With a CASB, you can detect misconfigurations in the cloud infrastructure and prevent sensitive data from being exposed unprotected. It can also help you identify and stop shadow IT or unauthorized applications threatening corporate security policies. Using a combination of auditing, log analysis, and threat intelligence, the solution can proactively alert and quarantine unauthorized devices, applications, or files. The CASB can also encrypt data-at-rest and data-in-transit to reduce the risk of loss or theft of corporate information in the event of a breach. It can also provide community trust ratings to classify applications and determine their safety. When evaluating CASB vendors, it’s essential to understand your organization’s specific needs and prioritize features about those use cases. It’s also crucial to consider your organization’s cybersecurity maturity level. You can assess the CASB vendor landscape by looking at media coverage and analyst reports to see which solutions have vital track records of preventing breaches and quickly remediating them. You can also conduct a CASB trial to evaluate the capabilities of a specific CASB solution before committing to it.
