Whether you’re planning to implement a cloud access security broker (CASB) for the first time or considering its use for some time, this article can help you determine what features to look for.
CASBs provide a comprehensive view of the cloud service traffic between an organization and its provider. They can then classify and remediate cloud services based on general security, regulatory compliance, and legal factors.
Automate Compliance
Cloud access security brokers (CASB) are on-premises or cloud-based security policy enforcement points that combine and interject enterprise policies as cloud resources are accessed. These policies include authentication, single sign-on, authorization, credential mapping, device profiling, encryption, tokenization, logging, alerting, malware detection/prevention and more.
CASBs can help automate compliance with various regulations, including HIPAA and GDPR. For example, they can detect unauthorized use of corporate data by users and devices on the cloud infrastructure and report these findings back to the IT team.
A good CASB should integrate with other components of an organization’s security ecosystem, such as DLP and endpoint management. It should also provide data loss prevention capabilities that enable granular control of sensitive data.
In addition, a sound CASB system should be able to discover data and applications in the cloud. This allows administrators to perform risk assessments and determine whether the data and applications are appropriate for the organization.
A CASB should also protect corporate data from threats by monitoring suspicious user behaviors and using benchmarks to block malicious file access. Additionally, a good CASB should incorporate threat intelligence sources and machine learning to help identify the latest threats.
Automate Security
The CASB acts as an automated policy enforcement center, unifying different forms of security policy enforcement and applying them to anything your organization uses in the cloud. This includes any device seeking to access your cloud services, such as unmanaged cell phones or IoT devices.
Using these rules, CASBs enforce security policies at a highly granular level, such as allowing a finance team member to create a sales report with sales data while blocking them from accessing finance data. This enables consistent policy enforcement across your entire environment and can be extended to geographic regions.
A good CASB also provides a wide range of data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities, which help protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and health records. This protects data at rest and in transit from unauthorized access or leaks.
Ultimately, a CASB helps businesses control cloud apps, enabling them to take a granular approach to data protection and policy enforcement while ensuring compliance with regulations and standards. Doing so makes it possible to safely use time-saving and cost-effective cloud services while limiting the risk of breaches and other security incidents.
Automate Access Control
Access control systems make it easier to regulate who can enter your building. They can also keep track of visitors and their movements, which will help you in the event of an emergency.
Most access control solutions involve a server and card reader, determining when to unlock doors for specific people and tracking their activity. These servers can be card readers, dedicated computers, or cloud-based services.
They can restrict or grant access to areas of your business based on employee roles and job duties. For example, a warehouse worker might only have access to designated tools for the job.
Businesses use access control systems to protect sensitive data. They protect health records, financial information and client data stored on company-owned servers from unauthorized access.
CASBs allow you to set and enforce access rules that define what type of data your users can access, including information about customers, clients, suppliers, vendors, etc. They can even detect and remove public or external shares of files, which can help prevent data breaches and other security threats.
Automate Monitoring
Cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions provide visibility into data and user usage in cloud applications, enabling you to protect corporate data from threats. They help you gain a comprehensive view of how employees use data and will allow you to ensure that their use of data complies with your business’s data policies.
CASBs monitor user behavior patterns and use machine learning-based user entity and behavior analysis (UEBA) technology to detect suspicious activity. They also use capabilities like adaptive access control, static and dynamic malware analysis, priority analysis, and threat intelligence to prevent data breaches by blocking malicious software.
The UEBA technology compiles a comprehensive view of standard usage patterns and uses it as a comparison point to detect abnormal behavior. Using this information, CASBs can see and remediate threats from unauthorized users as soon as they gain improper access or attempt to steal data.
Automated monitoring is a crucial part of any enterprise’s CASB strategy. It enables you to proactively identify policy violations and automatically respond to them with actions such as blocking, overriding, warning, encryption, or quarantining.
Automate Reporting
If your team requires data and analytics to make big decisions, automating reporting can save time and help them understand the information better. Automated reporting software can take a variety of sources – such as Excel, Crystal Reports and ERP systems – merge them and produce reports for stakeholders that are easy to understand.
In addition to automating operational and ad-hoc reports, you can set up weekly and monthly reports that can be delivered via email. This ensures that you can send accurate and timely information to your audience so that they can make informed and strategic business decisions.
CASB solutions provide visibility into cloud usage, including the number of users and devices accessing sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services. This helps organizations better understand how to use resources to scale and optimize their security posture.
CASBs also monitor user behavior patterns and other indicators to identify suspicious activity that could lead to a data breach. This enables IT administrators to review and mitigate threats before they occur so that they can protect against malicious behavior.
