The shift to the cloud has made it exponentially harder for organizations to maintain visibility into where their data is used in any cloud environment and applications. With this visibility, companies can ensure that the use of data complies with data policies. CASBs offer several key benefits to help address these issues. They provide visibility, access control, threat prevention, and data protection.
Encryption
As organizations move more business-critical applications into the cloud, they’re at increased risk of security breaches. Encryption helps safeguard data stored in and transmitted across cloud solutions, shielding sensitive information from anyone without the decryption key. CASBs can help enforce security policies and monitor activity to detect attacks, alerting teams instantly to mitigate threats.
CASBs can also monitor devices and users to ensure unauthorized users and devices aren’t accessing cloud apps, even when those applications are outside the corporate network. Additionally, CASBs can use data security features such as account takeover protection and malware detection to protect against cyber threats. CASBs can integrate with core security infrastructure to deliver the best cloud security. This includes integrating with DLP, endpoint management, and web security to offer a seamless integration that provides unified visibility for cloud activity. This allows organizations to secure all cloud solutions, including sanctioned and unsanctioned (Shadow IT) applications. It will also enable businesses to audit their cloud usage and ensure that regulated content is secure per compliance guidelines.
Data Loss Prevention
As organizations increasingly adopt remote work, BYOD policies, and SaaS solutions, it can become difficult for IT to keep tabs on the data they are storing and sharing in the cloud. A CASB system offers visibility into all the data being transferred to the cloud and detects threats to prevent breaches resulting from lost or stolen information. This is accomplished by identifying all the applications in use, assessing risk factors, and providing security teams with the ability to customize access control policies. This allows organizations to limit access to data to those that need it most, minimizing risk and improving security.
CASBs also enable companies to protect against malware distributed through cloud storage and SaaS platforms. By analyzing cloud data, CASBs can identify attachments to phishing emails and block the distribution of malware in the cloud. This capability is especially important for organizations that store bulk confidential data, like law firms and finance corporations. This feature helps them ensure a risk-free environment while reducing operational costs. The best CASBs also integrate with existing endpoint security to provide additional visibility into user activity in the cloud.
Access Control
A CASB solution helps ensure that the intended users only use cloud application accounts. This is an essential security measure because unauthorized access to cloud applications and data can result in lost revenue, intellectual property theft, or reputational damage. A CASB also helps ensure that data is only stored in locations that meet corporate policies regarding third-party storage. This is an important consideration because a power outage at a cloud data center could cause lost or permanently damaged data.
Remote work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) practices have expanded the attack surface for many organizations, including unsanctioned devices, tools, and services that IT departments often need help to see or control. A CASB helps with this challenge by scanning and identifying cloud application usage and providing visibility into the data environment.
It then performs risk assessments to determine which apps should be allowed and what level of access should be granted. This provides an elegant alternative to binary security systems that only block or allow services that do not serve the needs of a modern workforce managing multiple environments and devices.
Monitoring
As companies move to a remote work environment, protecting data in the cloud becomes increasingly important. CASBs provide security tools that allow enterprises to apply the same policies to protect on-premise data in a distributed environment. Monitoring is a key function of CASBs and can help enterprises detect and stop threats. For example, suppose an employee downloads customer data from Salesforce at a strange time or shares files with their Google account. In that case, a CASB will alert security admins to this activity and take action. Insecure interfaces and APIs allow threat actors to access accounts and steal sensitive information, including passwords, health records, and financial information. CASBs can monitor for these vulnerabilities and protect anti-malware, sandboxing, and packet inspection capabilities.
In addition, CASBs can also help maintain compliance in the cloud. By assessing application security configurations against various standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR, CASBs can identify areas where risk is high, and help organizations address those issues.
Compliance
As data moves to the cloud, IT teams need more visibility of its use. This lack of control can make it difficult for organizations to achieve compliance with strict regulatory requirements like SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. CASB solutions can help by using monitoring, detection, and blocking tools to protect against cyber attacks that could impact data.
CASBs also leverage malware protection and ATP to stop threats at the source on the network’s edge and in cloud applications. They can use indexed document matching and exact data match to find malicious content and prevent it from moving between applications or devices. CASBs offer a much-needed security boost to enterprises that must balance modern work and a changing workforce with existing cybersecurity systems. When combined with the right cloud DLP, CASBs can ensure that sensitive files do not enter sanctioned or unsanctioned (Shadow IT) applications and that they remain protected during movement. They can also identify unusual behavior in the cloud and take action against ransomware, compromised users, and rogue applications.
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