You might be disheartened to learn that your corporate network isn’t fully protected even if your company spent millions of dollars on security infrastructure like firewalls, next-gen firewalls, secure web gateways, web application firewalls, vulnerability scanners and endpoint security. You can blame the unsanctioned use of Cloud Apps (Shadow IT) for yet another network risk.
With cloud apps, your ability to prove compliance with data protection regulations, reduce data breach risk, and confidently expand adoption of cloud apps is behind the times. Unfortunately, none of your existing technology investments have been designed to tackle the growing problem of Shadow IT.
Cloud Access Security
The goal of any Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) is to provide a visibility and control point between employees and Cloud Apps for things like threat detection and policy enforcement. Cloud App traffic can be accessed by API or by creating a broker between Cloud Apps and users in the following ways:
- On-premise hardware; proxy gateway
- Cloud Native-API
- Software based; such as browser plugin
- Hybrid that includes a mix of any the above
Cloud Monitoring can help you decide which approach will be the best for you. To go a step further, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) can also help you accomplish the following tasks to varying degrees:
- Assess Shadow IT risks
- Detect risky users
- Maintain corporate governance, risk and compliance guidelines
- Encrypt and tokenize data to ensure confidentiality
- Control identities and access to Cloud Apps
- Prevent cloud data loss
Most companies only need CASBs for specific functions, so businesses need to choose wisely. There are a few mainstream solutions with heavy integration requirements and deep feature sets, but for most companies, these solutions aren’t appropriate. Deciding which is best for your business will depend on your specific needs and requirements. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.