The CASB, or Cloud Access Security Broker, was born out of necessity in response to the rapid increase in use of cloud-based services and SaaS applications. Traditionally, organizations have protected their on-premises sensitive data with a combination of enterprise firewalls, identity, and access control solutions. However, those solutions can’t be used when the data lives in a third-party cloud, e.g., a SaaS application—especially when governed by policies that differ from one provider to another, and typically don’t satisfy an organization’s internal security requirements.
CASB addresses these challenges and more by proxying: being in the middle of the interaction between the end user and the cloud service, enforcing access and data protection policies and both ends of the transaction, making sure the user has the right privileges for the data they’re trying to access as well as ensuring that they are doing so in a secure fashion, preventing data loss and access to malicious actors.
CASB stands on four pillars – visibility, compliance, data security, and threat protection:
CASB provides visibility
Of major concern to organizations today is what is referred to as “shadow IT”, and the associated risks involved with BYOD use of cloud applications. Inadequate visibility and a lack of comprehensive audit logs often result in failure to comply with organizational security requirements. CASB capabilities often allow an organization to not only monitor access to the cloud resources but also act on potential threats and prevent unauthorized access.
CASB brings compliance
Many organizations must comply with regulatory and security guidelines like SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, and preserving PII of the users. CASB helps by encrypting data at rest and by automating reporting and auditing.
CASB helps data security
CASB provides the ability to monitor access to the organization’s sensitive data hosted in the third-party cloud services.
CASB provides threat protection
CASB protects the organization from potential threats and malware by analyzing and providing insights on malicious acts, based on the user and network behavior.
The Banyan cloud access security broker
CASB is an essential security component for any organization, providing a set of capabilities that allow organizations to monitor, manage, and prevent potential threats to their sensitive data. However, setting up and running a traditional CASB can be complicated and brittle, and doesn’t necessarily fulfill all of an organization’s security requirements.
Banyan Security’s modern take on CASB as part of our device-centric SSE (Security Service Edge) solution delivers a comprehensive view of the organization’s IT and security posture, with fine-grained access control and monitoring capabilities, focusing on usability and visibility while leveraging state of art technologies such as ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access), VPNaaS (cloud-based VPN), and SWG (Secure Web Gateway) for holistic protection.
