CASB Security: Amid the widespread adoption of cloud services, it’s challenging for IT teams to keep up. CASB solutions fill the gaps by providing visibility, compliance, and protection.
A CASB offers security for data in motion and at rest, shadow IT control, SaaS security posture management (SSPM), unified device access, encryption, and malware detection. They also provide UEBA technology to detect anomalous behavior and prevent breaches.
4 Reasons, Why You Should Have CASB Security
1) Authentication
When it comes to CASB security, authentication is a critical feature. Many CASBs perform granular, risk-based authentication during user login and perform deep inspection to detect abnormal behaviors and stop unauthorized access from third parties.
They can also apply rest and transit encryption to secure data from theft. A CASB can also identify potential cloud infrastructure misconfigurations, which can lead to severe data breaches. By analyzing logs and monitoring device activity, they can alert administrators to risky configurations and take automated action to resolve the issue. This helps prevent shadow IT and unauthorized applications from uploading data to unsecure locations. The CASBs can also discover unauthorized connected devices that employees use. This is important because an unauthorized app can expose sensitive data, such as customer information or intellectual property.
The CASB can then alert administrators and enable them to disconnect from the third-party application. Most organizations would be dismayed if they saw how many apps their employees use. With the help of a CASB, they can discover which apps are being used to access organizational data and disconnect from inappropriate or risky ones. During the evaluation process, IT teams should ensure that their CASB vendor offers discovery and visibility capabilities and the ability to connect with identity-as-a-service solutions.
2) Encryption
A CASB protects data by encrypting it on its way to and from the cloud, making it impossible for attackers to read sensitive information. This is especially important for businesses that require a high level of security, such as healthcare, financial services, and public sector entities.
Additionally, a CASB enables organizations to monitor and enforce granular access policies for managed and unmanaged devices. This is especially helpful with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, which can make it difficult for IT teams to oversee data movement within the organization’s network. CASBs also offer visibility into shadow IT by tracking unauthorized cloud applications and devices. This allows security teams to take action before a breach occurs, such as alerting the team to an unauthorized device or preventing users from uploading data to unauthorized locations.
As the business adopts more cloud-based applications, it becomes easier for hackers to gain unauthorized access and steal sensitive information. A CASB’s threat detection capabilities can proactively monitor and detect abnormal behavior, such as multiple logins from an employee using the same device or a sudden increase in file downloads. Depending on the use case, a CASB may also have features that help reduce costs, such as identifying and reducing risky infrastructure configurations. A CASB can also optimize data loss prevention (DLP) practices by monitoring and analyzing cloud-to-network traffic for sensitive data and alerting administrators when potential leaks occur.
3) Data Loss Prevention
A CASB’s primary security pillar is data protection. This includes detecting and remedying threats that threaten the organization’s data, such as malware or ransomware, as it moves between internal and external networks. A good CASB will scan encrypted connections and apply advanced threat protection capabilities such as anti-malware, anomaly detection, and machine learning to detect ransomware, in addition to offering granular policies and integrations to enable organizations to protect data across multiple cloud services.
Additionally, CASBs should support the ability to identify and monitor traffic to public and external shares of files and provide data loss prevention (DLP) that works natively within the product to stop sensitive information from being publicly shared or uploaded to untrusted sites. The DLP should also integrate with the rest of an organization’s security infrastructure to enable a unified approach to data protection.
Visibility is also essential; a good CASB will allow organizations to discover all the apps they have in use, including shadow IT and scope redundancies, and evaluate license costs. Some CASBs also offer optimization capabilities to reduce latency when deployed as an inline proxy. In addition, a good CASB can audit an organization’s cloud applications to ensure compliance with industry regulations and best practices. Some CASBs also inspect outgoing data inline to prevent sensitive information from being sent to untrusted destinations.
4) Behavior Analytics
The ability to monitor user behavior is one of the most essential features of a CASB. With Shadow IT, unmanaged devices and applications, and unauthorized access to cloud services, security administrators need clear visibility into cloud application usage to understand who is leveraging what in the environment.
A CASB can provide this visibility and reduce risk by blocking unauthorized cloud applications. Additionally, a CASB can prevent data leaks by detecting sensitive content moving in and out of the cloud and by encrypting data at rest with tokenization and information rights management techniques. This is essential for achieving compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries. CASBs can also detect and block malware and ransomware, stopping threats at the source. They do this by analyzing traffic patterns and using machine learning to perform UEBA, which can detect suspicious activity and identify compromised accounts.
CASBs can also prevent malicious code from being introduced into an environment by scanning files for malware or ransomware before they are uploaded or shared and by identifying misconfigurations in infrastructure that could result in a breach. While a CASB can protect against many threats, it’s essential to carefully evaluate each vendor and its capabilities to ensure they fit your organization.
When evaluating a CASB solution, look for a platform that addresses your unique use cases and can scale to grow with you.
