What is CASB?
According to Gartner, Cloud access security brokers (CASBs) are on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed. By 2022, 60% of large Enterprises will use a CASB platform for their cloud services, which is up from less than 20% today.
Why is Cloud Security Important?
You would know that a lot of your sensitive data is already in the cloud. At least 79% of enterprises are actively deploying cloud solutions in public, private or hybrid cloud environments. With progressive adoption, more and more enterprises will move their critical workloads to the cloud.
The amount of sensitive data that lives in public clouds makes them an attractive target to computer criminals. Computer attacks are typically automated and evolve in sophistication as more and more defenses are added to the systems. The security provided by the cloud providers is more geared to protect the infrastructure than the applications that run on the cloud, leaving a security gap that is filled by the CASB systems.
The CASB systems help protect your cloud services by what are termed as four pillars of CASB functionality. Let's briefly talk about these:
Visibility
A CASB system gives enterprises visibility into authorized and unauthorized cloud usage. It can view and monitor data traffic between the corporate network and the cloud platform. CASB also allow you to see how cloud services are being used, and by whom; cloud usage, user behaviour analytics, and help detect over privileged users and assets.
Compliance
With CASB, you can identify sensitive data stored across cloud services. It protects and ensures compliance of application workload. It also provides logs for audit purposes, can encrypt sensitive data-at-rest to protect against a breach.
Threat Prevention
CASBs prevent unwanted devices, users and versions of applications from accessing cloud services. CASBs use auto-discovery to identify cloud applications in use and identify high-risk applications, high-risk users and other key risk factors. It has the ability to identify threats if anomalous behavior is detected and users can respond to threats in real time; protecting sensitive company data.
Data security
CASB is able to monitor access to data, enforce security policies and prevent unwanted activity. Based on the company policy, it protects enterprise data in the cloud by preventing certain types of sensitive data from being uploaded or downloaded. CASB may enforce a number of different security access controls, including encryption, tokenization and device profiling. Proactive application and data security measures ensure that sensitive data is protected.
