CASBs are security policy enforcement points between cloud service providers and their users. They can address gaps in cloud security across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments.
Increasingly, organizations are using cloud services. This has led to the expansion of the data landscape, making it harder for businesses to control network usage and protect corporate data.
Encryption
Cloud access security brokers are vital for protecting your enterprise’s data against cyber threats. They provide visibility, data control, and analytics to protect against malware and other threats leading to data breaches.
Encryption is an effective way to safeguard sensitive data in transit and at rest. It’s also essential to an organization’s overall security strategy to prevent data leaks and protect critical company information from unauthorized use.
CASBs apply an organization’s security policies to cloud applications, leveraging autodiscovery and threat intelligence to identify high-risk apps, users, and other key risk factors. They can impose various security access controls,, including encryption and device profiling.
A CASB can also help organizations comply with regulatory standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS and SOC 2. These solutions also assist enterprises in identifying and remediating data breaches as they occur.
Today’s businesses face challenges involving cloud usage, BYOD policies, and Shadow IT (unsanctioned applications, devices, or software used to access cloud resources). A CASB is a solution that addresses these issues by providing visibility into all cloud activities. Moreover, a CASB can allow or block specific cloud services and impose centralized security policies on all cloud-based applications.
Data Loss Prevention
Cloud access security brokers protect against cyber threats by establishing and enforcing data loss prevention (DLP) tools and processes for all data flowing to and from the cloud service or application. They also monitor the cloud environment to enforce policies and proactively identify violations.
CASB solutions can help organizations meet compliance and industry standards, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FFIEC and FINRA. They help enterprises address their security needs in various cloud services and environments, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
For example, a healthcare organization concerned about HIPAA and HITECH compliance can implement a CASB to enforce security policies for sensitive patient data in the cloud. A retail company focused on PCI-DSS compliance can also use a CASB to ensure it meets those requirements.
Data loss prevention is an effective way to safeguard data and prevent breaches. CASBs combine DLP with contextual access control, which allows IT to monitor the level of data access and privilege escalation. The solution can also use user behavior analytics to detect unusual usage patterns. This is useful for identifying users who are sharing or accessing sensitive information in ways that violate policy.
Authentication
Authentication helps you secure your data, systems and users against cyber threats. It involves confirming identity through confidential information like a password, username or a unique object, such as a key fob.
Unlike the old days, when only IT professionals and scientists could authenticate using passwords, authentication is now a practice used by almost everyone online. For example, you can log into Facebook using a unique username and password or open your phone with TouchID or a unique PIN.
While these authentication methods are not the most secure way to verify someone’s identity, they offer a layer of security that hackers often do not have access to. This type of authentication is also called multi-factor authentication.
CASBs provide a robust defense against cyber threats by detecting suspicious user behavior and access to data in the cloud. This can help prevent Shadow IT, malware, data breaches and regulatory noncompliance. It can also enforce additional security requirements, such as extra authentication or denying data access. Ultimately, CASBs enable IT to control and protect cloud data while increasing confidence among the organization’s stakeholders about how they use the cloud.
Access Control
As cloud services and users grow, organizations must implement comprehensive security policies that protect their data from threats. One such policy is access control.
This helps minimize the risk of data breaches and ensures unauthorized users don’t get access to sensitive company information. It also protects against data exfiltration by employees or a third party.
CASBs use user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to help identify abnormal use patterns, alerting security teams of possible compromise. UEBA also helps to prevent malware by detecting malicious activity before it has time to propagate.
Moreover, CASBs allow security teams to keep up with compliance standards and regulations. By examining the usage logs of sanctioned cloud applications, they can monitor and detect violations to limit access to sensitive data.
Monitoring
As organizations migrate their data and systems to the cloud, they must ensure that all access is secure. This includes protecting sensitive information and keeping it out of the hands of cybercriminals.
A cloud access security broker can implement various tools that protect against all cyber threats. These include malware prevention, encryption, and sandboxing technology.
CASBs also use machine learning and intelligent automation to identify abnormal behaviors and alert cloud security teams to suspicious activity. This allows cloud security teams to respond and mitigate any potential attacks quickly.
Using a CASB to monitor data in the cloud can help organizations gain visibility into their end-to-end cloud landscape, which is crucial when evaluating whether a cloud access security broker is right for them. It will enable them to see how various SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) components are used and any correlations between their operations. They can also find redundancies in functionality and license costs, giving them a better understanding of their cloud spend.