With the proliferation of BYOD and unsanctioned software-as-a-service use or Shadow IT, CASB services are needed to protect corporate cloud infrastructure. CASBs combine policy enforcement with discovery, logging, UEBA, and encryption for advanced threat protection.
Encryption secures data at rest and in transit, protecting sensitive information from theft and eavesdropping. CASBs also discover risky infrastructure configurations and help IT resolve them.
Encryption
A CASB can encrypt data at rest and in transit, scrambling it into an unusable form for attackers. This security measure makes it difficult for hackers to access sensitive information, even if they breach a company’s network. It can also help prevent data loss.
CASB cloud services include logging, alerting, policy enforcement, and malware detection/prevention. By consolidating various standalone security solutions into one centralized point, the platform lowers the complexity of cybersecurity while still protecting business-critical applications and data from cyber threats.
Aside from providing a centralized view of cloud usage, CASBs can proactively identify and recommend actions that improve data security. For instance, they can weed out risky files by identifying the type of data contained (i.e., personally identifiable information, corporate confidential data, and more), preventing employees from sharing these files with external parties or unrelated personnel.
Furthermore, CASBs can reduce the risk of shadow IT by monitoring and identifying unauthorized cloud apps. This capability is handy for companies with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) or bring-your-own-computer (BYOC) policy. It requires employees to use their own devices for work purposes. With this feature, a CASB can detect and block applications on employees’ devices, scan and monitor cloud storage, and sync clients for signs of malicious activity.
Account Alerts
CASBs provide visibility into all cloud resources, including files, accounts, and devices. This visibility helps to detect suspicious activity, such as unauthorized access or uploaded malware. This enables administrators to alert users, take immediate action, and prevent a potential data breach or cyber-attack.
For example, a CASB can help ensure compliance with data regulation by identifying new devices that appear on the network. It also communicates this information to an organization’s IAM tools, allowing it to verify and manage user access.
This includes identifying whether someone is using a corporate or personal account, ensuring that the right people are in the right places at the correct times and that sensitive information is not being shared outside the organization. It can also detect misconfigurations, such as a security setting that leaves a system vulnerable to hackers.
Additionally, CASBs can identify shadow IT, infrastructure, and applications employees use without the IT team’s knowledge. By identifying these services, a CASB can prevent them from leaking corporate data or being exploited by attackers. It can also help prevent attacks that leverage stolen credentials to access critical systems. To do this, the CASB monitors for risky configurations and alerts the administrator when they occur. It then applies the appropriate policies to prevent access and block any threats.
Organization
With the demise of network perimeters, enterprises have adopted cloud-based collaboration tools and services to enable more effective remote work. CASBs help bridge the gap these new workflows create by providing visibility and control over cloud usage.
CASBs discover cloud-based resources, classify them by risk, and alert administrators to potential unauthorized connections like shadow IT. They also protect data from being uploaded to unauthorized locations and detect malicious threats that can disrupt productivity, steal data, or expose security vulnerabilities.
The best CASBs use machine learning to recognize standard behavior patterns and identify abnormal activities that may indicate threats. They can detect suspicious login attempts, block unauthorized cloud access, and stop malware attacks by blocking, identifying, and stopping phishing and other malicious code.
Unlike a SASE solution, which provides a more holistic approach to network and WAN security, CASBs are cloud-focused and provide specific capabilities for securing cloud infrastructure. This includes protecting the unstructured data on your organization’s cloud systems, such as Microsoft 365. Varonis CASBs monitor this data on the journey to and from the cloud, detecting behaviors that uncover unsanctioned or shadow IT and enabling granular policies to govern your organization’s use of these services.
When selecting a CASB, ensuring that the service can evolve with your business is essential. It should scale as your organization grows and support additional functionalities such as activity analytics and endpoint detection. It is also essential to ensure that the CASB you select can offer a range of mitigation capabilities, including prioritized static and dynamic malware analysis to block attacks before they occur.
Authentication
CASBs authenticate cloud applications and their data to protect organizations from threats that use stolen credentials to steal sensitive information or disrupt the operations of cloud services. CASBs also detect and block malware that enters the organization via cloud applications and access. This is accomplished by comparing the behavior of cloud apps and data against regular patterns and identifying anomalies, using machine learning-based user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA), and incorporating threat intelligence.
CASB solutions also encrypt data at rest and in transit to safeguard organizational information stored on and moving between cloud-based software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service environments. This helps organizations comply with strict regulatory standards such as SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR.
As a centralized security hub, CASBs simplify the management of many cloud-based security tools by consolidating them into one dashboard. They can ingest data from secure web gateways, application firewalls, and other security tools to detect and analyze activity and provide real-time insights into the risk levels of all cloud applications, including unsanctioned software and Shadow IT.
It is important to note that not all CASBs offer the same features. When evaluating potential vendors, be sure to look for the following capabilities: