A CASB offers a range of security measures, including data loss prevention (DLP), to protect against threats in cloud environments. This includes protection from breaches, malware intrusions, and ransomware attacks.
CASB solutions may come in the form of on-premises hardware or software but are best supplied as a cloud service for lower costs and greater scalability. CASBs provide cloud usage visibility, including sanctioned and unsanctioned apps (aka Shadow IT).
Defend Against Threats
Traditional security services secured the enterprise network’s perimeter and focused on users, access, and data storage. However, enterprises are exposed to new risks with the cloud and BYOD. CASBs help to protect against these risks by providing visibility into cloud usage, enabling organizations to disconnect from risky applications, and protecting data in the cloud with encryption.
What is CASB in cybersecurity? A CASB provides visibility into your organization’s cloud-based applications and data, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned (Shadow IT). This enables security teams to identify high-risk activities outside their line of sight, including those not covered by your compliance policy. CASBs also provide data discovery, analytics, and monitoring to reveal insights into your cloud environment, such as the number of apps used, possible redundancies, and license costs.
CASBs can also detect and prevent data loss from unauthorized access by applying policies that allow, block, or limit access to corporate information. They can even encrypt data at rest and in transit to protect any sensitive information stored on the cloud from eavesdroppers.
A CASB can also identify and prevent malware, phishing attacks, and other cyber threats by analyzing user behavior patterns to identify suspicious activity and alert administrators. This can include identifying rogue apps trying to steal information and blocking unauthorized data transfers. Additionally, CASBs can use obfuscation technologies like tokenization to replace identifying data with non-sensitive data so that it won’t be readable if the data is intercepted.
Defend Against Malware
As malware threats grow more sophisticated, they can evade detection and hide within legitimate applications. This makes detecting suspicious activity and ensuring cloud application security challenging for IT teams. A CASB protects against these threats by monitoring and securing access to cloud-based applications. This includes sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud apps – commonly known as shadow IT – and delivering the right level of security to data in motion and at rest in the cloud. This includes malware prevention and enabling granular authentication, alerts, and encryption to help prevent breaches from stolen credentials or misconfigured applications.
CASBs monitor and record standard behavior patterns to form a baseline, then detect activity that deviates from this. They also use techniques like device posture profiling, dynamic malware analysis, and threat intelligence to spot and prevent attacks. In addition to preventing unauthorized access, CASBs can be used to stop other cloud threats. This includes the unauthorized exfiltration of sensitive files from the organization, whether by malicious actors using stolen credentials or by negligent employees who accidentally share confidential information.
CASBs can also be used to enforce compliance with industry regulations and government mandates like GDPR. By providing visibility, automated remediation, policy creation, and enforcement, CASBs help organizations ensure they are exercising governance over their cloud environments.
Defend Against Data Loss
With the proliferation of remote work and bring-your-own-device policies, organizations must safeguard data in their cloud environments. A CASB provides visibility and security controls and helps to defend against unauthorized access.
A CASB monitors activity and detects suspicious behavior, alerting administrators of risky actions and providing remediation options. Using intelligence about user devices, including IP addresses, browsers, operating systems, and other device attributes, the CASB can identify the data type accessed and determine its sensitivity. It can then use tokenized and encrypted data to protect against threats and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
CASBs can also identify misconfigurations that could lead to a data breach and automatically revert them. They can even encrypt data in transit across the internet to keep it secure from unauthorized access. CASBs also detect shadow IT and help stop unauthorized applications, such as those installed on employees’ devices.
A CASB can detect malware in SaaS applications and prevent its spread within the organization’s cloud environment using advanced malware prevention techniques, such as dynamic detection, behavioral analysis, and machine learning. It can also integrate with endpoint solutions to share threat intelligence and automate the response to detected attacks. Lastly, a CASB can distinguish between sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS tenants and apply appropriate policy enforcement to each instance.
Defend Against Unauthorized Access
As businesses move data to the cloud, they must manage access and ensure that usage complies with policies. Unsanctioned applications like “shadow IT” and unauthorized file sharing pose significant risks. A CASB can prevent these threats by monitoring for abnormal activity. By registering patterns of behavior using user entity and behavior analysis (UEBA), the CASB can build a baseline and identify any deviation from normal usage, alerting security teams to high-risk activities. This allows the organization to take action, such as requiring extra authentication or limiting data access, to protect sensitive information.
A CASB can also protect against unauthorized data exfiltration from the cloud, whether malicious actors steal credentials or negligence results in oversharing corporate intellectual property on a public link. CASBs can help prevent this data loss by scanning for unauthorized and risky cloud application use, including stale apps that haven’t been used in some time or those used by users outside the organization’s control.
The CASB can detect misconfigurations of SaaS applications that could lead to a data breach and automatically remediate these vulnerabilities. It can also provide visibility into how the cloud environment is being used, enabling security teams to understand better the types of data stored and the locations where it resides.
