A CASB offers comprehensive security functions, including malware prevention, data encryption, and access control. CASBs are often deployed alongside secure web gateways and DLP to deliver complete coverage of the threat landscape from device to cloud.
CASBs provide visibility into cloud application usage and identify high-risk applications, users, and other risk factors. They also apply security access controls, perform device profiling, and support credential mapping when single sign-on is unavailable.
Authentication
In addition to enforcing access policies, CASBs can authenticate users and devices before providing access to cloud applications. This helps protect against unauthorized use of shadow IT and BYOD, which can result in data breaches. CASBs also offer visibility into unauthorized devices and applications, helping to prevent security risks by identifying unusual activities that could indicate a threat is in progress.
So, what does CASB stand for in cybersecurity? A Cloud Access Security Broker is a vital component that helps organizations secure their data and applications as they move to and from cloud environments.
CASBs catalog cloud apps and services, providing a centralized view of the organization’s cloud environment. This allows IT to safely enable sanctioned and unsanctioned apps without impacting productivity, ensuring that only approved cloud services are used. They can also automatically control and secure data movement to and from these apps based on their risk level.
CASBs rely on advanced analytics to identify and mitigate cloud environment threats. They scan for vulnerabilities, malware, phishing links, and other suspicious activity. They then encrypt data in the cloud, ensuring the information is unreadable if intercepted and stored on an unauthorized device or location. They also save data in motion, preventing sensitive information from being uploaded to unauthorized cloud services or accessed by attackers when moving between locations. They can even detect misconfigurations, which often cause security breaches. These capabilities enable organizations to confidently adopt the cloud and ensure compliance with corporate governance requirements.
Encryption
The use of encryption on data-in-motion and at rest helps to protect against threats. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information and protects against malware and phishing attacks, as well as tampering with files.
A CASB helps to identify abnormal activity by compiling a comprehensive view of regular usage patterns, using machine learning-based UEBA to analyze behavior. This reveals unauthorized activities, such as moving sensitive data from a private cloud to an unapproved third party. It also identifies any unauthorized devices connected to the network. This allows security teams to limit, override, or educate users participating in unauthorized activities.
Many CASB solutions also help to control risky file sharing by implementing policies like data loss prevention (DLP) and role-based access controls that restrict the transfer of sensitive data outside the organization. Additionally, they can help to remediate SaaS misconfigurations that can leave the organization vulnerable to attack.
While stemming the threat of unsanctioned software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage, known as Shadow IT, is an essential CASB use case, they also provide much more granular visibility into how cloud applications are used within the enterprise. This allows security teams to train employees on secure usage and safely enable productivity-enhancing, cloud-based SaaS apps. This is often called “SaaS governance” and is an essential component of CASB.
Access Control
The CASB’s primary function is to monitor cloud usage and detect suspicious activity. CASBs offer deep visibility into multi-cloud environments, including who is accessing data, what device they’re using, and where the user is located. This visibility allows an IT team to set security rules based on contextual considerations. It also lets them identify unauthorized users and devices, reducing the risk of account compromise or insider threats.
CASBs use advanced analytics to detect anomalies in the behavior of cloud-based applications and users. This includes detecting unusual transactions, suspicious logging, and other activities that may indicate a threat. This functionality provides a powerful defense against many forms of malware in the cloud and other threats that are difficult to detect by conventional tools.
Combined with security controls, this visibility and control offers significant protection for the organization in its cloud environment. It prevents sensitive data from leaving the corporate network, reducing the risk of a data breach or loss. It enables an IT team to set granular data policies based on device, location, and other contextual factors. It also allows organizations to discover and control unsanctioned app usage by employees, enabling them to take appropriate action.
However, a CASB must be able to balance safety with productivity. It should allow an IT team to set permissions at a granular level so employees can safely use productivity-enhancing and cost-effective cloud apps.
Monitoring
CASBs help administrators keep track of data usage and discover applications and services they have not sanctioned. This visibility helps administrators identify and remediate risky activities like file uploads to unauthorized locations or security vulnerabilities from inappropriate access permissions. Visibility also helps administrators detect unused or stale cloud applications and discover threats that could cause a data breach incident.
While stemming threats was a significant driver of the initial widespread adoption of CASBs, securing the movement and storage of sensitive data in the cloud is also increasingly vital. A CASB’s monitoring capabilities can identify anomalies in moving files onto or off a cloud service, including encrypting and fingerprinting files on the web to ensure privacy and security. It can also detect malware risks by analyzing activity, identifying compromised accounts, and stopping suspicious authentication and authorization attempts.
The ideal CASB will work with your security infrastructure to secure all aspects of your cloud environment. It should support a variety of deployment options, such as API control, reverse proxy, and forward proxy, and provide granular data views and insight. It should have a strong record of protecting the flow of data in and out of the cloud and be equipped with features such as credential mapping and single sign-on (SSO), device posture profiling, threat protection, logging, alerting, and encryption of both data-in-motion and data-at-rest.
