With the proliferation of cloud environments and applications, it’s become increasingly more work for IT to maintain the visibility of data movements. This is where CASBs come in. A CASB tool can help organizations monitor their data in SaaS and IaaS environments and enforce security policies. Sometimes, they can also provide advanced DLP capabilities and even offer granular data loss prevention.
Features
There is a vast amount of potentially sensitive information in the cloud and traveling to and from it, including everything from trade secrets to personal data. A reliable CASB solution will classify this information and offer encryption, tokenization, and highly granular access control protections. A good CASB will have visibility into all cloud applications used by an organization and help IT enforce security policies at an extreme granularity. A CASB will also protect against threats by monitoring suspicious activity, such as creating shadow IT installations or data leaks to and from unapproved cloud apps. The CASB will alert the IT team of these risks and, depending on the level of risk, take steps to remediate the problem.
Pricing
A CASB is one of the best tools to protect cloud data from threats. It offers a full suite of protections, including malware mitigation, adaptive access control, and geofencing. All of these features are key for a robust security package. Additionally, it’s essential to find a solution that does not impact network performance. Proxy-based CASBs will slow down your networks because they act as a “man in the middle” for every communication. This is why it’s best to look for API CASB vendors that don’t have this effect. It’s also important to consider how much technical support is available for the CASB tool. Different teams need varying levels of support, so choose a vendor with highly-rated customer support and an active social media presence. In addition, if you’re working with K-12 or higher education, select a solution that is independently certified to comply with federal student data privacy regulations.
Deployment
CASB solutions can be deployed in three ways: reverse proxy, forward proxy, and API mode. Each has advantages and disadvantages, but many experts recommend choosing a CASB that supports multiple deployment modes for maximum flexibility. Using auto-discovery, CASBs reveal shadow IT behaviors, such as sharing files via global link share or third-party applications granted access to company data. They also help protect data in the cloud with protections like encryption, tokenization, and highly granular security controls. They are also effective at detecting anomalies, such as unusual attempts to download data from Salesforce or suspicious activity on employee devices that may be caused by malware. They can even help your team comply with industry regulations governing the responsible use of corporate data, including HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. They can also assist with the increasingly difficult task of securing sensitive, regulated information when it’s moved to the cloud by helping streamline compliance reporting and detect potential violations. Lastly, they can improve end users’ security by prioritizing and blocking malicious or suspicious content based on dynamic analysis and static threat intelligence.
Support
CASB solutions should offer a robust suite of protections, such as malware mitigation, adaptive access control, end-user behavior analytics (UEBA), and encryption/tokenization. These capabilities help protect sensitive data stored and shared within cloud applications, even if it gets into the wrong hands. Because so much data is traveling into and out of the cloud, including personal and corporate data, a CASB is essential for modern businesses. A good CASB solution should be able to discover this data and securely enforce security policies while also adhering to modern privacy standards. School technology teams must choose a CASB vendor with a good track record of preventing breaches and responding quickly. Review media coverage and analyst reports to find vendors with a solid reputation for cybersecurity. Then, evaluate each seller against your organization’s specific use cases. This will help you choose a CASB reseller that can deliver a comprehensive, integrated solution. Ideally, a CASB will help your team monitor and protect data shared in commonly used cloud-based applications.
Integrations
The best CASB solutions will integrate with your existing security applications, including your DLP, SIEM, firewalls, and more. This is important as it helps ensure your enterprise security infrastructure works together to protect your organization from cyber threats and cloud application usage policy violations. A good CASB solution will have integrations that help you better protect your sensitive data against malware and ransomware in your cloud environment. This includes complete visibility of all your cloud services, including those using SSL encrypted connections, anomaly detection, and threat intelligence, such as which of your users have compromised accounts. You should also find out whether your CASB offers static and dynamic anti-malware detections, plus machine learning to detect ransomware. A good CASB solution will also protect your sensitive information as it moves between the cloud solutions you use and within your network through access control, collaboration control, DLP, encryption, and tokenization. This is important as it can reduce the impact of data loss due to unauthorized or accidental access.
