How Can a Cloud Access Security Broker Help Your Business?
With the rise of remote work, BYOD, and unsanctioned employee cloud apps (Shadow IT), security teams must monitor data movement to ensure compliance and protect sensitive information. A CASB is one solution for this challenge.
A CASB acts as a policy enforcement center, consolidating multiple security policies and applying them to anything that goes into or out of the cloud. This includes malware prevention, encryption, and logging.
Ensure Compliance
With remote work becoming more commonplace, employees rely on cloud apps more than ever. With that comes the challenge of ensuring compliance with these tools. A CASB helps businesses maintain compliance by acting as a cloud security checkpoint between users and cloud-based resources.
So, what is a CASB? It can help identify and control various activities, including data sharing, encrypting files in transit, monitoring suspicious behavior, and more. A CASB can also protect against threats by leveraging user and device behavior analytics, static and dynamic malware prevention, and machine learning to detect ransomware.
The best CASBs can provide a centralized view of how and where an organization’s cloud-based applications are used, including unsanctioned services. From there, it can evaluate the risk associated with each app by cataloging them, assessing what sort of data they store and how it’s shared. It can then automatically set access controls to and from cloud services based on the enterprise’s security requirements.
This helps the organization ensure compliance with various industry standards and government regulations, including regional mandates like GDPR and ISO 27001 and security-specific rules such as HIPAA. A CASB can also integrate with an organization’s identity and access management (IAM) tools to authenticate users, enabling the IAM team to verify that they have the appropriate permissions.
Monitor Your Cloud Spend
As the cloud-based business model continues to grow, IT personnel must remain vigilant about ensuring the security of their sensitive data. With the right CASB, organizations can see which apps are accessing their enterprise data and how it is shared. This enables them to ensure compliance with standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI-DSS.
Additionally, CASBs can identify and classify applications that can be used as a bridge into internal systems or for unauthorized activities. This can help with various things, from identifying misconfigurations that could lead to a breach to preventing shadow IT by blocking unauthorized devices or services.
The right CASB solution can also help administrators find system redundancies that can be eliminated as the business grows and changes. This means that you can keep all of the benefits of your cloud-based environment while reducing the risk and cost associated with these additional systems.
Finally, CASBs can protect against file loss by encrypting data at rest and in transit in sanctioned and unsanctioned applications. This can prevent sensitive files from being compromised and lost in a breach or malware attack. A good CASB will also monitor suspicious activity using benchmarks and continual traffic data to detect threats and alert administrators. This allows IT to respond quickly to cloud threats and mitigate their impact.
Get Your Arms Around Cloud Security
With services previously offered on-premises migrating to the cloud and workforce mobility increasing the number of devices used to access corporate data, keeping the visibility of and control over data security has become more complex. CASBs help you overcome these challenges by acting as a policy enforcement center, consolidating multiple types of security policy functions, and applying them to anything that uses cloud resources. This includes sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and any device attempting to access them, including unmanaged smartphones and personal laptops.
By acting as a gateway between users and cloud applications, a CASB automatically discovers cloud-based applications and their usage. Then, it identifies and classifies the sensitive information within those apps. It also specifies where it’s stored and determines whether it is encrypted. This granular approach to visibility and control helps prevent data loss and keeps your organization in compliance with any regulations related to privacy, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS.
This is why businesses that depend on cloud-based solutions like Microsoft Office 365 or Box, or those with remote teams, need a CASB solution. With one, employees can keep up with the day-to-day use of productivity-enhancing and cost-effective cloud applications. It’s also difficult to ensure these solutions follow your company’s data policies and don’t put confidential information at risk.
Help You Find Redundancies
The proliferation of cloud services within organizations has made securing data and preventing threats more difficult. A CASB helps you address these challenges by helping you discover shadow IT and other security issues. It also enables you to enforce policy and provide data protection, threat detection and prevention, and compliance.
With more remote and BYOD employees, it’s more challenging to monitor the security of sensitive information. This increases the risk of employees inadvertently sending business data to the wrong person or accidentally exposing critical information through a cloud service. Regular data loss prevention (DLP) tools cannot detect or stop this type of leakage, but a CASB can.
A CASB solution offers visibility into your cloud infrastructure, helping you determine how much data is stored and used by what applications. It then compiles this data and classifies the risk levels of the cloud apps, enabling your team to set policies for user access and data storage based on your organization’s security guidelines.
When selecting a CASB, be sure to look for one that was designed from the ground up to protect your cloud data. This will eliminate policy conflict by utilizing standardized categories for SaaS, IaaS, and web security and save your team valuable time by reducing the number of configuration steps needed to implement DLP and threat protections.
