How to Choose the Right CASB Solution for Your Business

Choosing the right cloud access security broker (CASB) solution is essential to securing data in today’s multi-cloud environment. Whether you are evaluating proxy-based or API-based CASB solutions, there are vital factors to consider.

CASBs provide deep visibility into cloud usage, including cloud application accounts and services. This can help organizations ensure compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS.

Visibility and Control

If your business is looking for a CASB solution, visibility and control should be high on your list of priorities. These two critical elements help you navigate your regulatory and compliance requirements, which in turn frees up resources so you can focus on your core business.

It would help if you looked for a CASB solution that can provide granular visibility and control across your cloud usage. This is particularly important in a highly distributed environment where users may access many different SaaS applications from multiple locations.

The CASB solution should also enable you to easily manage data policy violations by performing actions such as blocking, overriding, warning, encryption, or quarantining. It should also automatically proactively monitor the cloud security environment for policy violations.

In addition, you should look for a CASB solution with built-in data protection technologies like encryption, tokenization, and access control. These capabilities are essential to protecting your company’s sensitive data as it moves to the cloud.

Threat Detection

The right CASB solution should also offer real-time threat detection capabilities to monitor and identify malicious activity. This includes threats ranging from malware to social engineering attacks.

To do this, a CASB must deeply understand your users’ activities and security hygiene practices. This includes hardening endpoints, configuring systems for least privileged access, and segmenting networks to limit lateral movement.

Detection can take many forms, including indicators, threat behaviors, and dynamic analysis. Each one excels in different scenarios and uses cases, so choosing the one that best meets your business needs is essential.

Lastly, the CASB you choose should be capable of monitoring and controlling access to cloud applications, ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive data. This ensures your employees can work securely without fear of data breaches or identity theft.

Policy Enforcement

Policy enforcement is critical to any CASB solution, as it helps businesses enforce data security policies across their entire cloud ecosystem. It is also a vital line of defense for remote work and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. It extends security policies to employee devices connecting to corporate networks or multiple cloud resources outside the office.

To achieve this, a CASB must provide visibility into cloud application account usage by user, application, department and location. Additionally, it must enable API-level support for your most sensitive cloud applications.

This means it must automatically classify data based on sensitivity level, so it can dynamically apply granular policies as needed. It must also provide advanced data protection technologies to encrypt sensitive data as it’s transferred to and from the cloud.

Policy enforcement is critical to any cloud security solution, as it helps businesses enforce data security and compliance policies across their entire cloud ecosystem. It also helps protect against data leaks through accidental and intentional access. It also acts as a vital line of defense for remote work. It brings your device (BYOD) policy, extending security policies to employee mobile devices connecting to corporate networks or multiple cloud resources.

Data Loss Prevention

CASB solutions help organizations identify and prevent risky or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive data. These include customer information, intellectual property, future business plans and financial information.

As a result, a CASB solution can play a crucial role in securing data stored in cloud applications and protecting against regulatory requirements. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require organizations to maintain control over sensitive data.

To protect your data in the cloud, you need a CASB that can automatically classify how sensitive it is on the fly and across your multi-cloud infrastructure. This allows you to create granular policies that dynamically apply depending on your data’s sensitivity level and context.

CASBs have also become an essential part of the security stack in cloud environments because they can offer visibility and authentication for users accessing cloud apps. This is especially useful in work-from-anywhere situations where employees have personal devices and networks they don’t manage.

Analytics

Analytics, a critical part of your security program, enables business executives to understand and analyze large amounts of data for insight into their operations. This can include customer behavior, market trends, and operational efficiencies.

Ideally, the CASB solution you choose should facilitate and accelerate this process with a platform that supports the entire analytics cycle–from gathering the data to providing insights and prescriptive actions. This means a secure, flexible, reliable, and fast solution that can access and process both on-premises and cloud-based data to meet your business objectives.

To make this happen, you need a solution that lets users sift through and manipulate their data without specialized training, so everyone in your organization can benefit from the full potential of this powerful tool. Moreover, the ideal CASB should be a self-service tool without IT assistance, providing point-and-click or drag-and-drop functionality.

In summary, a CASB should offer complete visibility of all cloud services in your environment — even those using SSL-encrypted connections. It should also guard against malware, ransomware, and other threats using anomaly detection and threat intelligence sources.