5 Reasons Your Business Needs a CASB System
Protect your organization from threats introduced by unsanctioned cloud services (known as Shadow IT). CASBs monitor and control data at rest and in motion, offering the ability to detect and stop unauthorized activity without blocking services entirely. Unlike binary security systems that block or allow, a CASB can take a more granular approach to protect your organization by balancing productivity and safety.
Security
Organizations becoming more remote and reliant on cloud applications must secure sensitive information. A CASB system helps protect data in motion and at rest with features like firewalls, access control, threat detection and mitigation, DLP, encryption, and more. A CASB can help reduce the risks associated with Shadow IT, which refers to apps or infrastructure that an organization’s IT team does not know about or manage. In addition, CASBs can be used to identify unknown or unsanctioned applications that may be downloaded to employee devices. Using data classification, a CASB can determine the risk level of an application and then take action accordingly. These actions may include reducing bandwidth usage for apps that are not essential to productivity, enabling two-factor authentication, blocking access to certain websites, or scrambling files before they reach the cloud. This helps to minimize external and internal dangers that hackers, malware, and other threats could pose. CASB solutions also help to prevent the loss of company information through accidental or malicious actions by employees, such as by avoiding unauthorized downloads and sharing.
Compliance
Many organizations use cloud services that don’t conform to compliance standards, and CASBs allow companies to monitor and protect data in these environments. A CASB can also help with compliance by helping you maintain and audit data residency. CASBs can help organizations avoid shadow IT by identifying unsanctioned applications and devices, then alerting administrators of the activity. They can also prevent users from uploading files to unauthorized locations and provide visibility into what’s stored in the cloud.
Visibility
A CASB solution provides visibility into all cloud activity to ensure it’s safe to use. It analyzes data handling and third-party connected apps to identify potential security risks. This includes hackers using leaked credentials to gain access and steal intellectual property. It also has employees oversharing files via public links that anyone can access and insider threat, such as sales personnel downloading customer sales records before they leave the company. The CASB discovers all the resources on the organization’s infrastructure and then classifies them by risk level, providing security teams with clear visibility into unsanctioned cloud applications. It then monitors the activities of these applications and alerts IT teams if there is suspicious behavior, such as data being uploaded to unauthorized locations or malware infections. The CASB can also help protect the information in a breach by encrypting data at rest and in transit. It can also obfuscate data by swapping out personal identifiers with symbols (tokenization). These measures ensure that even if a hacker gains access to the data, it will be useless because it cannot be decrypted or read.
Automation
A CASB helps automate many administrative tasks and reduces the risk of data breaches caused by human error. For instance, a CASB can identify risky infrastructure configurations and automatically remediate them. In addition, a CASB can monitor data in mot and detect unauthorized devices or applications accessing critical business information. Unauthorized cloud usage is a significant problem for finance companies, especially stockbroking firms, and this type of behavior can lead to massive losses. Employees may accidentally or maliciously share sensitive files on unsanctioned apps or lose critical financial documents from lost laptops or smartphones. This behavior can also result in an insider threat where a disgruntled or ex-employee gains access to valuable company information. A CASB can help minimize these risks by providing visibility into sanctioned and non-sanctioned applications, capturing and scrutinizing logs, preventing data loss, and blocking unauthorized devices or applications. Additionally, a CASB can perform an inline and out-of-band inspection of outbound web traffic to block data from being publicly exposed or shared with unwanted external audiences.
Integrations
CASB solutions can help reduce the risk of shadow IT, which are applications and infrastructure used without the knowledge or consent of an organization’s security team. They provide visibility into unauthorized assets and offer automated recommendations to prevent the assets from becoming a security threat. They can also protect data at rest and in transit by encrypting information, scrambling it into a form that cannot be read unless the decryption key is provided. They also help prevent threats by detecting and alerting when anomalous activity occurs, such as unauthorized data uploads to third-party locations or malware attacks. Additionally, they integrate with existing security infrastructure and SOC processes through out-of-the-box integrations.