Cyber Security
Dawn of CASB – The return!
C By Annu Singh
loud Services are at the core of IT infrastructure fueling the digital strategy of enterprises today. A look at the statistics below highlights the rapid rate of adoption of cloud services:• The public cloud service market is expected to reach $206.2 billion in 2019 worldwide. (source: Forbes) • 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. (source: Forbes) • 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service. (source: flexera) But concerns of security and compliance, coupled with BYOD and mobile that provides anytime, anywhere accessibility to your organisation’s data continues to dampen the euphoria of cloud adoption. Both cloud service providers and consumers are jointly responsible for security in the cloud. While the cloud service provider focuses on securing the data in the cloud and enterprise on the premises, user behavior and shadow IT leaves in-transit data vulnerable. There is a gap to secure the data which flows to and fro, from enterprise and the cloud service provider environment. This gap is addressed by security tools collectively termed as Cloud Based Access Security Brokers which extend the cover of an organisation's security policies, by acting as a proxy between cloud apps and users.
What is CASB? The term Cloud based access security broker (CASB) was coined by Gartner in 2012. In simple terms CASB represent an emerging market of products and services that provide cloud security solutions between cloud solution providers and enterprise on premise security policy perimeters. Gartner defines CASB as ‘on- premise’ or ‘cloud-based’ security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine
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and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed. CASBs consolidate multiple types of security policy enforcement. Example security policies include authentication, single sign-on, authorisation, credential mapping, device profiling, encryption, tokenisation, logging, alerting, malware detection/ prevention and so on’.
Key Aspects of CASB CASB operates on four pillars: Visibility, compliance, data security and threat protection. CASB provides visibility into user behavior by giving valuable insights into details like users access to authorised and unauthorised applications, devices used, their locations/departments, data accessed, frequency and time of access, actions etc. Key compliance requirements to ensure internal and external security in the cloud by regulatory governance frameworks like SOX, HIPAA, NIST, ISO27001, GDPR, PCI compliance are more comprehensively addressed via CASB cover. When data is stored in the cloud, the cloud service provider has access to the encryption key. With CASB the enterprise manages the access to the key while implementing data protection measures like encryption, tokenisation, and data loss prevention to bolster data security efforts. According to a study conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, 52% of businesses admit that employees are their biggest weakness in IT security. • Most worry about employees sharing inappropriate data via mobile devices (47%), the physical loss of mobile devices exposing their company to risk (46%) and the use of inappropriate IT resources by employees (44%). • Employee carelessness contributed directly to 48% of cyber security incidents, accounting for even more incidents than the theft of devices, which only
