CASB use cases for organizations can encompass a wide range of functionalities from discovery and visibility, to monitoring and control over cloud activity. As businesses increasingly transition to cloud infrastructures, they encounter challenges in managing their security posture. With the migration of data and applications to the cloud, the attack surface for potential cybersecurity threats is also expanding. To mitigate risks with cloud or web applications, businesses are turning to cloud access security brokers (CASBs) to add an extra layer of security and control over their cloud environments. CASBs help organizations monitor and enforce security policies, and access controls to ensure data protection and compliance in the cloud.
Cybersecurity concerns in cloud infrastructures
Listed below are some of the main cybersecurity concerns that organizations face, which necessitate the use of CASB:
- The perimeter-less nature of cloud platforms makes it difficult to monitor who accesses what, complicating cloud security monitoring.
- The shared security responsibility model often causes confusion in terms of setting up configurations, resulting in unintentional misconfigurations.
- Malicious software is easy to implant in organizations via untrusted cloud app usage.
- Data theft or manipulation can be done through hijacked or compromised user accounts when using untrusted cloud applications with poor security measures.
- Using an API while facilitating communication between applications in the cloud, can expose vulnerabilities to third-parties when authentication, encryption, and other access control methods are poorly designed.
A cloud access security broker, or CASB, is cloud-hosted or on-premises software or hardware that functions as an intermediary policy enforcement point between cloud users and cloud service providers.
The evolution of CASBs have brought about benefits that vary from compliance, data security, and threat protection to overall data and traffic visibility. The CASB market reached USD 7 billion in 2023 and is expected to hit USD 25.57 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 17.9% from 2024 to 2030.
Use cases of CASB in cybersecurity
A CASB is different from other security approaches and technologies such as SIEM (though SIEMs can have CASB capabilities), web application firewalls, and secure web gateways in that it provides visibility around cloud data apps and files, offers contextual insights on user traffic, and enforces security policies. Some of the cybersecurity use cases that a CASB can help with are:
Monitoring and managing shadow IT
Shadow IT opens up a challenge for enterprises that deal with numerous third-party apps on a regular basis. Employees may use cloud applications or services without approval from the IT department for work as well as personal reasons. These apps might include file-sharing services, collaboration tools, or other productivity apps that are not vetted or monitored by the organization's IT security team.
To address this issue, a CASB offers features that can identify all cloud applications being used within the organization, including sanctioned and unsanctioned apps (shadow IT). CASB can also provide visibility into the data being accessed and shared through these unauthorized applications, allowing IT teams to monitor and manage the flow of sensitive information more effectively. By setting access policies and control policies around the use of third-party apps, organizations can reduce the risks associated with shadow IT and ensure compliance with data protection regulations. CASB solutions are able to provide insights to the IT team with contextual information about cloud activity such as all access requests, top applications accessed, and top users accessing banned applications.
User monitoring to mitigate threats
A CASB is great for mitigating threats, since attackers often target unsecured networks when compromising enterprise data. With a CASB solution, organizations can monitor users' behavior in real time and closely track any instance of prohibited activity. For example, a CASB is able to monitor:
- Users' cloud activity from both managed and unmanaged endpoints.
- Cloud app usage to provide comprehensive visibility on user information including user location, device, device type, and browser.
- Suspicious traffic movement, including file size and type being uploaded and downloaded. Control policies can be set to block suspicious file types from being uploaded.
Deploying a CASB solution takes care of both external and internal threats by monitoring data in transit as well as data at rest in the cloud rather than just at the network perimeter.
Protection against data leakage and data loss
Data leakage and loss is one of the main concerns when it comes to CASB use cases for cloud security. CASBs can perform comprehensive audits of file permissions across cloud applications and services. By analyzing permissions granted to users, groups, or external collaborators, CASBs identify potential misconfigurations or overly permissive access settings that could lead to data exposure. The solution can then encrypt and restrict access to such sensitive files.
CASB solutions can block user access requests depending on factors such as unusual time, and downloads performed from unfamiliar locations or devices. They monitor user interactions with sensitive data, device types used to access cloud resources, and the types of files being uploaded or downloaded.
CASB solutions can also be integrated with a DLP solution if the enterprise already has one in place. In this case, a CASB will work to enforce the preexisting configured DLP policies and enforce them in cloud services.
Prevention of account takeovers
Unauthorized cloud apps can have weaker security standards compared to the official, sanctioned applications used within the organization. They may lack proper encryption, MFA, or other security measures commonly implemented by IT departments. Often, employees utilize their work email addresses and passwords when setting up accounts or logging in to such third-party cloud applications or reuse passwords between personal and work accounts. If any of these cloud services are compromised or suffer a data breach, the credentials used by employees become exposed, leading to account takeovers and other targeted attacks at the organization.
CASBs for cloud security
The implementations of CASB use cases are instrumental in cloud security, addressing data leakage, insider threats, and data exfiltration risks. They offer vital capabilities to monitor, control, and safeguard sensitive data across cloud services. Seamlessly integrating with existing security infrastructure, CASBs empower organizations to navigate digital transformation securely with confidence.
ManageEngine Log360 is a comprehensive SIEM solution that combines DLP and CASB functions with advanced threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities to provide proactive security to businesses while ensuring regulatory compliance.
