Security teams must monitor the environment as organizations rely on cloud apps and services. A CASB enhances data loss prevention (DLP) practices by delivering visibility, discovering Shadow IT, and encrypting data at rest or in transit on remote devices.
It’s not uncommon for employees to upload files from cloud collaboration tools to their personal Dropbox accounts. CASBs can detect these risks and prevent the exfiltration of intellectual property using UEBA.
Encryption
The best CASBs can prevent data loss through rest and transit encryption. Encryption makes your data unreadable in case a malicious actor intercepts it. It’s also a powerful tool for protecting files when users download them to personal devices or lose corporate laptops.
A CASB’s threat protection pillar can detect threats inside and outside the firewall, including malware, ransomware, and unauthorized application usage. The CASB can identify the source of the threat and then halt activity to protect against loss or exposure. It can also send a log to security teams so they can take remedial action.
In addition to detecting threats and preventing their spread, a good CASB can monitor and alert administrators of cloud misconfigurations. It can also stop shadow IT and unauthorized applications from accessing sensitive or confidential data. It can also perform an authentication risk assessment to validate that users are who they say they are. Finally, it can leverage community trust ratings and other visibility to classify applications and quickly determine their safety for enterprise use. The CASB can then block or allow access to sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services based on risk level. For example, it could block access to a personal Dropbox account while allowing access to the company’s G Suite or Salesforce.
Access Control
As companies shift to a cloud-based business model and the threat landscape evolves with blended attacks, multiple exploits, obfuscation technologies and other tactics, CASBs have developed to provide visibility into users, apps and devices as well as secure and protect data in motion and at rest in a wide range of cloud environments. CASBs also detect anomalous behavior to alert security teams of potential threats and risks before it is too late.
CASBs enable organizations to secure their cloud applications better, reduce shadow IT risk and comply with industry and government regulations. They can help encrypt and fingerprint files moving into and out of the cloud to prevent data loss and ensure security in a cloud environment that can be challenging to control, especially for a remote and dispersed workforce.
Combined with an advanced firewall or next-generation secure web gateway, a CASB provides visibility into sensitive content traveling to and from the cloud so that data risks can be identified and stopped before they cause a major breach. In addition, a CASB that incorporates cloud data loss prevention (DLP) enables users to securely share content with colleagues while protecting the organization’s sensitive information.
The Proofpoint CASB solution helps businesses gain visibility into all apps employees use, regardless of whether the app is hosted on a public or private cloud. It can ingest and analyze access logs to identify misconfigurations that could create a data breach and block unauthorized applications.
Authentication
Authentication is a critical component of data loss prevention. With malware becoming more sophisticated and phishing attacks more targeted, it’s important to have robust controls that ensure only authorized users can access data. A strong CASB can monitor user behavior, detect suspicious patterns and protect against threats that would put sensitive information at risk.
For example, if a developer tries to download customer information from a SaaS application, the CASB will flag this activity as suspicious and alert an administrator. Additionally, a CASB can use features like identity access management and integration with current solutions to validate users and prevent them from downloading files that could threaten data security.
Visibility into the entire cloud environment is vital to data loss prevention. Organizations need to know how their data is used in sanctioned and unsanctioned applications—or shadow IT—to understand the risks and meet compliance requirements. A CASB can also provide visibility into SaaS security posture management (SSPM) and advanced threat protection.
A CASB can detect when sensitive content moves to untrusted locations in the cloud and endpoints. This helps support employee productivity while reducing the risk of costly data breaches, which average $16 million for organizations. It can also help prioritize investigations and identify situations that require employee education or immediate attention.
Data Loss Prevention
A CASB can enhance an existing DLP (Data Loss Prevention) practice to ensure your cloud apps and SaaS tools do not get into the wrong hands. Unlike traditional DLP tools that do not effectively extend into the cloud, a CASB can monitor file activity and report on data exfiltration to identify risks that need to be addressed with real-time context-based education, training and mitigation.
As remote work and BYOD increase, organizations require visibility into their cloud deployments to prevent data leakage. A CASB can automatically detect files uploaded to unapproved third-party locations and alert administrators of suspicious activity. This enables administrators to enforce data policies and educate users on the best practices for sharing files.
CASB solutions can also help to maintain compliance with regulatory standards by detecting data breaches and reporting on them, as well as identifying potential violations of industry-specific regulations like GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS. They can also support risk-based assessment to prioritize the security problems for your security team to tackle first.
For example, Code42’s CASB solution, Incydr, works with our Next DLP tool to optimize the DLP practice. This allows organizations to safely enable sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and apps by controlling activities at a category level rather than blocking the service completely, thereby allowing productivity while mitigating risk.
