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Cloud computing has shown the industry the path to meeting future needs while getting away with the traditional challenges associated with the legacy infrastructure.
Eventually, cloud adoption has become a new normal with every organization preferring cloud as an effective means to do everything-as-a-service’.
With the continuous revolution in information, data sharing and storage, cloud is becoming crucial than before in the IT landscape.
Exactly at this point emerged the hot discussion i.e., cloud security!
While the cloud technology proved to be effective for data and storage, the questions are arising around data security and privacy in a cloud environment. This very factor is concerning many IT leaders leading to a big debate everywhere.
This is where access controls and security protocols became crucial than ever from security internal data centers to cloud environments.
One such tool that the industry is heavily relying on Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) for enterprise cloud security.
Many organizations are still far away from understanding the core advantage of CASB, while many IT leaders place it at the heart of the enterprise cloud security infrastructure.
In fact, CASB was one of the first war against the ‘shadow IT’.
CASB is merely a cloud-based software or a hardware or an on-premise software that acts in between users and cloud service providers.
In a cloud security infrastructure, CASB's active role can extend across any kind of platform such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), among others.
While most organizations think if we really need CASB when we many encryption procedures around. The appropriate answer is ‘yes’, say many cloud security experts.
What makes CASB so interesting is its ability to bring together different security measures active across a specific cloud environment, thus providing required visibility and control over the user movement.
Besides offering high visibility, CASB facilitates ways to extend security policies from an on-premise solution to a cloud solution, and also creates room to prepare policies for a cloud-specific context.
Overall, CASB works its best way as the security policy enforcement center in enforcing all the required security governance and compliance policies across the cloud to every device, resource and platform, among others serving within that specific business cloud space.
CASB’s functionality is typically built on the following core principles, including:
• Management, which primarily involves ensuring high visibility and clean-up after every security risk scenario
• Security, which involves the need to prevent high-risk events, which can arise out of unexpected outages, data leaks and intrusion activity.
• Zero-day protection, which involves ensuring protecting and safeguarding assets from malwares, data risks and more.
• Visibility, lacking of which can be a major security risk in any organization, especially larger ones, where many employees enjoy access to multiple applications in the cloud space. This has to happen typically in the view of IT to confirm that an organization’s security governance and compliances are up to the mark. Here is where CASB offers a special advantage by offering enhanced visibility into cloud application usage, user information, device location and more.
• Compliance
While most organizations in a cloud domain outsource have system and storage on the cloud space, they need to comply with the set of regulations to ensure safety and privacy of enterprise data they outsource. CASB can help them comply with standard regulations like HIPAA, among others. CASB typically determines the risk areas with regard to compliance and directs the security teams on ways to act against them.
• Data Security
While the seamless data movement is beneficial in the current day, safety and security of data comes as the utmost concern. Though the DLP principles are in place, they often fail to extend to cloud space. This is where CASB presents the advantage of extending to cloud space. So, CASB and DLP combination can offer a far-better advantage in ensuring secured movement of data within the cloud, cloud to cloud and out of cloud. Security features like data loss prevention, information rights management, encryption and access control, among others.
• Threat Protection
Unexpected IT threats are most common in a cloud environment, which can be due to compromised access controls, malicious content and stolen credentials, and more. CASB can be helpful in identifying anomalous user behavior by presenting a comprehensive view of usage patterns for comparative analysis. CASB also uses machine learning methods to identity and act against threats upon detecting any unauthorized access.
CASB is built on the aforementioned principles, with security, compliance, governance at the heart of its functioning.
Working at the network end, CASB typically scans every connection associated with a cloud environment, irrespective of its approvals.
While there are proxy-based CASBs that work as firewalls that monitor access and real-time data threats, they take a backstep to CASB in terms of network response times and inability to secure unknown or unregistered users.
Gartner says CASB is an essential element of enterprise cloud security. Though it is a crucial aspect of cloud security infrastructure, it may not make up the complete cloud security strategy.
Thus, organizations will also need to look for a comprehensive plan expanding on CASB, bringing in other features like Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), among others to make up a robust cloud security posture.
CASB enjoys high prevalence in the modern-day scenario, where cloud security and cloud governance has become need of the hour for most organizations using platforms like Office 365 to connect over cloud.
In such an environment, security as a policy is of utmost significance than ever and CASB, coupled with other interesting security options, can definitely serve the purpose making online collaborations secure and complying with regulatory standards than never before.
Thinking of CASB deployment? CASB deployments usually happen in three different models: API-Controlled, Forward Proxy and Reverse Proxy. But Gartner recommends adopting CASB model that cover all cloud access scenarios. CASB can be deployed in an on-premises environment, while majority of CASB deployments happen SaaS-based.
Looking for CASB support? Bourntec can help you out!
We understand the importance of approaching each work integrally and believe in the power of simple and easy communication.
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