Introduction:
Migrating to the cloud and keeping all your corporate data safe is often a considerable challenge for organizations. Many companies do not migrate to the cloud simply because it makes them vulnerable. What companies fail to realize is that data security is still a problem for them, regardless of whether they are on the cloud or not. Company employees are already using various cloud services for socializing, ticketing, etc. Most employees also access these cloud applications through corporate workstations, which can essentially threaten your data.
Any company that wants to protect its data and keep a close eye on the applications running on workstations, even the cloud services, is in for a challenge. This is where cloud app security comes into the picture. Cloud app security can help by adding safeguards to your organization’s use of cloud services by enforcing your company’s security policies. Cloud application security brokers (CASBs) act as gatekeepers for real-time broker access between your business users and the cloud resources they use, wherever your users are and no matter what device they are using.
CASB addresses security gaps in an organization’s use of cloud services by providing granular visibility and control over user activities and sensitive data. The scope of CASB coverage universally applies to SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. For SaaS coverage, CASB typically works with the most famous content collaboration platforms (CCPs), CRM systems, human resource systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, service desks, office productivity suites, and business social networking sites. For IaaS and PaaS coverage, various CASBs govern the API-based use of popular cloud service providers (CSPs) and extend visibility and governance to applications running in the cloud.
Cloud App Security Architecture:
Cloud App Security provides integration with your cloud architecture by:
- Identifying your cloud application that is being used in your network and helps in assessing your infrastructure for better security.
- Helps restrict web applications to end-users by providing sanctioning rights to all used cloud applications.
- Built-in App Connectors to connect your APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and get visibility and governance of apps you’re connecting to.
- Applying conditional access app protection policies to get visibility and real-time control over activities and access within your cloud apps.
- A diverse range of policy templates available on the go for better security and existing security refinement.
Threat Protection:
Detects unusual behavior in the cloud apps to identify ransomware, compromised users, or malicious apps. It also, analyzes high-risk usage, and automatically corrects it to mitigate risk.
Shadow IT (Information Technology) Discovery:
IT Shadow discovery in Cloud App Security helps identify the cloud apps services used by your organization, such as M365, Azure, AWS & GCP. It investigates and assesses risk levels and usage patterns to provide more business readiness with more than 16,000 cloud applications and protection against 80+ risks.
Information Protection:
As data sharing becomes the norm in today’s corporate world, it is essential for organizations to protect against and restrict unauthorized access.? Well, with Cloud app security information protection, we get to understand, protect, and classify our sensitive data. Cloud app security provides us with controls and policies that have automated alerts to protect our data in real-time across the cloud infrastructure.
Compliance Assessment:
Compliance is a crucial factor to consider when you are dealing with regulated client information. Microsoft cloud application security (CAS) provides us with policies to prevent data leaks on non-complaints applications. It also limits access to internal or client information with a handful of insight to locations, IPIP (Intellectual Property) addresses, and web browsers used to gain access.
Conclusion:
In this blog, we familiarized you with Cloud App Security architecture and its usage. In the next few blogs, we will investigate how users can deploy and configure the Cloud App Security for shadow IT, compliance, information protection, and threat protection. Stay tuned!