5 CASB Implementation Best Practices

The Importance of CASB

CASBs filter cloud traffic and enforce security policies to increase control over business data that leaves on-prem infrastructure. They offer four main advantages:

1. Visibility: Reveals how your organization utilizes SaaS, including shadow IT or unmanaged devices.
2. Data Security: Access controls and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) mechanisms that protect your data as it moves from on-prem infrastructure to SaaS applications.
3. Threat Protection: Monitoring traffic for malware and other threats while also tracking activity to identify suspicious behavior.
4. Compliance: Ensuring data is available through the cloud remains compliant with relevant regulations.

Best Practices for Effective CASB Implementation

You can implement several CASB best practices to overcome these challenges while maximizing security and minimizing the impact on your operations. CASB deployment strategies have to find a way to maintain security without significantly impacting user experience.

By following CASB best practices, you can deliver SaaS security protections in a way that enables and does not hinder end users. This includes promoting approved SaaS applications and streamlining security mechanisms from the user’s point of view. Poor CASB implementation can end up driving users to unapproved cloud services, increasing shadow IT, reducing visibility, and generating new security concerns.

#1. Discover all Your SaaS Applications for Comprehensive Visibility

CASB integration requires an extensive discovery process of your SaaS landscape and the security posture of the various applications. Following CASB best practices during this process allows you to map out SaaS usage, assess the risks present, and develop appropriate security policies.

As the scale and complexity of your SaaS landscape increases, so does the likelihood of misconfiguration and running cloud services using suboptimal security settings. Additionally, you need to consider unsanctioned SaaS app usage and unmanaged devices. This requires cloud security best practices that monitor all traffic for comprehensive visibility rather than being restricted to approved services.

Once you have mapped out your SaaS landscape, you can classify and prioritize the most important apps based on the data they have access to. By assessing the risks posed by different services, you can develop security policies to protect your data and remain compliant.

#2. Define and Enforce Next-Generation Security Policies

With detailed information about your SaaS landscape, you can determine how different services fit into existing security controls and define the CASB deployment strategies needed to enforce consistent policies. This includes CASB best practices for integration with other security tools, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms and traffic filtering solutions like firewalls or Secure Web Gateways (SWGs).

Security controls you should consider during cloud access security broker implementation include:

• Limiting exposure by placing controls on what data can be uploaded to SaaS applications
• Anomaly detection to identify SaaS threats through behavioral analytics that trigger alerts when activity goes beyond normal boundaries
• Audit trail analysis to investigate alerts, identify true policy breaches and threats, and better define future controls and baselines for usual activity
• Automated remediation responses such as restricting access to data for certain accounts or blocking suspicious traffic

#3. Rely on Adaptive Access Controls and Identity Management

CASB integration helps enable adaptive access controls, providing the insights needed to ensure users have safe access to data while minimizing risk. By analyzing contextual information, adaptive access controls reduce the chances of compromised accounts or insider threats exposing sensitive business data.

Contextual information used to update access credentials could include historical behavior, role, device, location, and many other factors. Combining this information, you can develop a risk profile for different users and determine if they are behaving suspiciously. By continuously updating this risk profile, you can make granular decisions regarding access or additional security controls.

For example, if a user is utilizing a new device or accessing much more information than usual, you can add restrictions or implement new controls to prove their identity. This adaptive, zero trust implementation of access management is powered by CASBs monitoring cloud traffic to understand users within your organization.

Compared to traditional access control systems, an adaptive approach based on contextual data can provide seamless access to improve productivity while protecting sensitive information.

#4. Implement Proactive Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data loss prevention in CASB deployments is critical to minimizing cloud security threats. Implementing a more proactive approach allows you to stop data breaches before they happen rather than responding as quickly as possible after the fact. This includes utilizing advanced analytics and real-time monitoring to predict weaknesses and identify threats instead of relying on predefined rules and reactive measures.

With CASB integration, you can proactively identify the sensitivity level of different datasets to enforce policies based on their associated risk. Proactive DLP controls could include automatically:

• Redacting sensitive information
• Disabling downloads or sharing with certain SaaS applications
• Watermarking files
• Alerts if you are at risk of non-compliance

#5. Choose a Multimode CASB Solution

The main CASB deployment strategies, inline- and API-based CASBs, can both lead to security challenges. Inline-based CASB reroutes cloud traffic through a proxy server for real-time security controls (threat detection, access management, etc.). This can be performed by using forward (positioned close to the user) or reverse proxy (positioned close to the cloud services) servers.

Forward-proxy CASB monitors all cloud traffic to uncover shadow IT, while reverse proxy deployments only monitor traffic to approved cloud services. However, reverse proxy CASB is easier to implement and is good at securing access to approved services from unmanaged devices.

API-based CASB scans API calls to monitor cloud services without rerouting traffic. This provides better network performance without increasing latency. It also enables organizations to scan data stored on the cloud rather than only monitoring data in transit. However, it doesn’t provide real-time monitoring.

To overcome these deficiencies, multimode CASB combines both inline and API-based approaches to provide the benefits of each. This includes real-time monitoring of data and shadow IT visibility while scanning data at rest on cloud services.

Get CASB Capabilities with Check Point SASE

Implementing CASB capabilities and protecting your data across SaaS applications is simple with Check Point SASE from Check Point. Maximize security while maintaining seamless access with a comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. Schedule a short call today and learn how Check Point SASE could bring modern cybersecurity to your business.