CASB provides enhanced visibility and control of cloud applications. It also supports advanced threat detection and data protection features that help protect your organization from cyberattacks.
CASBs support a range of industry use cases, including securing patient data in healthcare, protecting financial information in the banking sector, and safeguarding student data in education. This article will explore the practical applications of CASB to address these critical needs.
Enhanced Visibility
As cloud usage increases, IT teams need visibility into all sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. Unsanctioned applications, also known as shadow IT, can threaten data security because they are often not covered by the enterprise’s compliance, governance, and risk policies. CASBs give enterprises the visibility into all cloud applications they need to ensure they have the best chance of catching a data breach in its early stages.
CASB explained that sensitive content can be moved to and from cloud applications, even if encrypted. This visibility lets you quickly identify a threat and apply the correct mitigation policy.
Visibility is a powerful tool, but it can be difficult for IT teams to maintain, especially as the pace of cloud migration accelerates and new applications are introduced. This is where purpose-built tools, like CASBs, help you achieve better visibility and understand what is happening in your hybrid cloud. This is the foundation for enabling traceability and observability, which are key to helping you respond to threats more effectively.
Advanced Threat Detection
The rapid expansion of cloud services makes it difficult for organizations to know the full scope of their applications and who is using them. A CASB solution uses discovery and auto-classification to identify and analyze the use of all the cloud applications in an environment and the users accessing them. This helps safeguard data, intellectual property, and users from internal threats like shadow IT and unauthorized access to cloud-based tools by threat actors.
Visibility into cloud application usage allows security teams to determine the risk level of each of them and enforce security policies based on that risk assessment. With advanced security technologies such as encryption, CASBs also protect data at rest or in motion.
With remote work and BYOD becoming the norm, CASB solutions provide significant visibility into cloud-based business resources. This helps organizations prevent the loss of sensitive information and intellectual property theft that often happens when employees accidentally overshare files or lose their company-issued devices. A CASB can help protect against these types of breaches by detecting suspicious activity and alerting administrators when a problem arises.
Comprehensive User Activity Monitoring and Reporting
With threat attacks evolving, enterprises need greater visibility into how their cloud resources are used. A CASB delivers this insight by detecting unauthorized connections, suspicious activity such as uploaded malware, or security vulnerabilities caused by misconfigured cloud applications.
By combining data discovery with advanced DLP, CASBs ensure that sensitive information is not being lost in the cloud or transmitted to an unsecured destination. This is a significant improvement over on-premises DLP solutions that only focus on protecting data at rest and cannot detect and protect information in motion.
A CASB can discover and control shadow IT services used without the knowledge or approval of the team and help prevent the loss of intellectual property such as engineering designs, trade secrets, and customer sales records. It can also identify accounts hijacked by attackers to distribute phishing emails and spam and reclaim these compromised accounts to thwart attacks. CASBs also automatically analyze and classify cloud applications, enabling IT teams to assess risk and take appropriate action, such as blocking or educating users. They can also adjust permissions at a granular level to balance collaboration with safety.
Automated Threat Detection
The proliferation of cloud applications and bring-your-own-device policies makes it harder to safeguard enterprise data. A CASB can help with this challenge by giving security teams an empowering view of data in use, in motion, and at rest inside the organization’s multi-cloud environment.
CASBs can automatically discover the cloud services an organization uses and use a classification method to determine the risk value of each application. This allows security teams to implement automated threat detection and remediation actions such as device profiling, access control, data encryption alerting, tokenization, malware prevention, and more.
A CASB can detect suspicious activity, such as employees sharing sensitive files through unsanctioned apps or moving data between clouds. Combined with a data loss prevention solution, this can automatically stop threats before they cause damage, even if the attacker is clever enough to avoid triggering a detection. In addition, a CASB can leverage machine learning to detect and respond to ransomware and other threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. These capabilities are critical for strengthening an organization’s defenses against the most serious threats.
Data Loss Prevention
Organizations have sensitive data residing in various cloud apps, whether sanctioned or not. This includes file-sharing services, corporate collaboration tools, and video conferencing solutions. Inadequate protections, user mistakes, and malicious activity can all lead to the loss of critical information to attackers.
To combat this, CASBs provide data loss prevention capabilities. These tools discover and protect sensitive files at rest in sanctioned clouds and en route to or from them. They enable organizations to detect risky files, apply enterprise policies based on categories such as criticality and confidentiality (e.g., Social Security Numbers or credit card numbers), and encrypt sensitive files to prevent unauthorized exfiltration.
In addition, CASBs also identify and help remediate SaaS misconfigurations that expose applications to attack. Combined with advanced threat detection, these tools allow organizations to safeguard their information in the cloud effectively.
