Chief Technology Officer/CISO
A cloud access security broker, usually referred to as a CASB, offers a security gateway between your company’s IT infrastructure and that of a cloud provider. Companies use a CASB to extend their own IT governance policies and government regulations to third-party software and storage. If you have concerns about internal or external security threats, monitoring usage and behavior, or auditing historical data, you may need a CASB. To understand this, it might help to read more about how a CASB works.
Features and Benefits of a CASB
To understand why vendors have begun to offer software that sits between the cloud and a company’s IT infrastructure, it might be helpful to consider some benefits that CASB can offer:
- Many companies can benefit from a CASB auto-discovery feature that will automatically report upon all applications used and high-risk users or applications. With the proliferation of devices and even shadow IT, businesses need a way to monitor the way that their data gets used and who uses it.
- Companies can use a CASB to enforce security regulations, like device protocols and encryption. This way, businesses can be certain that they conform to their own security policies and government regulations.
Most IT people understand the obvious benefit of having a service that can ensure and monitor security for third-party storage providers. This gives enterprises a chance to prevent, discover, and respond to threats. However, the benefits of these services also extend to offering a way to monitor activity inside the company. CASB gives corporations a critical tool that they can use to learn how their data actually gets used.
For example, shadow IT projects have sprung up in many organizations these days. While people in user departments may have legitimate reasons for developing their own applications or using their own devices, it’s important to monitor them and make certain that they adhere to the company’s security policies. Even if employees unintentionally violate government regulations, companies may still get penalized.
Examples of Popular CASB Vendors
A variety of vendors have emerged to supply CASB technology to companies. Each vendor offers somewhat different products and services. It’s helpful to highlight a handful of the bigger players, including Elastica, Illumio, and Skyhigh Networks.
Skyhigh Networks
Considered one of the leading companies in the CASB industry, Skyhigh Networks helps businesses adopt to cloud storage and applications while enforcing security, governance, and regulatory compliance policies. Products provide policy-based control, and they also offer visibility and analytics.
These are some highlights of Skyhigh Networks:
- Companies can make use of different kinds of data encryption, tokenization, and contextual control over access.
- The services help identify risky behavior that might signal a security breach, hacked account, or even an insider threat.
- Skyhigh Networks products also enable visibility, allowing IT security personal to identify shadow IT applications and various devices that request access to data.
Elastica
Elastica is a somewhat newer competitor to Skyhigh Networks, but the company appears to be gaining recognition quickly. According to a HubSpot analysis, some of Elastica’s strengths include the flexible CloudSOC platform and intelligent analytics. This software actually performs better as it remains in use at a specific company longer because it can learn more about typical behavior for that unique enterprise.
The Elastica CloudSOC platform offers a modular design to run these four main applications:
- Discoverability: Elastica’s Audit App discovers cloud-based applications and provides risk scores that help educate users.
- Event detection: The company’s Detect App uses machine learning to determine typical behavior and then detect behavior that lies outside of that range to provide risk scores.
- Remediation: Elastica lets companies take proactive measures to prevent threats by setting rules with the Protect App.
- Auditing and investigation: Finally, Elastica offers the Investigate App to examine historical information for auditing and threat investigation.
Illumio
Most enterprises have established different security parameters for different applications. For instance, a payment system may need to run under more sophisticated encryption and security protocols than a marketing system. Illumio often gets mentioned because its products make it easy to segment out different kinds of systems and data in order to provide customized security rules for each. The company also offers users the ability to use natural language commands to implement security policies, without necessarily knowing the technical side of the network.
Work With Us to Find the Best CASB Solution for Your Organization
If you have spent time looking into CASB providers, you probably know that this industry is still emerging and growing quickly. While it might seem like a lot of providers do similar things, there are differences in the way that they do it that might be more or less beneficial for your unique organization.
At DataEndure, we are interested in learning about your company’s IT security needs and reliance on cloud-based storage and applications in order to offer you our best solutions. We’d like to invite you to learn more about our enterprise security solutions, including a handful of case studies that illustrate how we have helped major corporations secure their IT systems and data. Contact us at any time to learn more about how we can help you secure your own business better.
